Instagram, the fun mobile app that lets users create stunning retro-looking photos with ease, is moving to the world of high art. From 22-23 October, London’s East Gallery at Brick Lane will be hosting the first ever UK exhibit of Instagram photos.

Dubbed “My World Shared“, the exhibit is organized by the London branch of Instagrammers, a community of Instagram users who offers tips and techniques and organizes “photowalks” and other social events for their users.

The exhibit will host photos from 30 participants. As explained on the official website, the idea behind the project is “to record in images our world around us, our lives, our outlook, our views, and share that view with the rest of the world.”

Instagram has been growing like a weed in the last year or so: in August, the service celebrated its 150 millionth photo, just nine months after the iPhone application first landed in the App Store.

Recently, Instagram launched a completely overhauled mobile app with a number of interesting new features, including the possibility of taking high resolution photos, live filters and more.

More About: exhibit, gallery, instagram, london, photo, photography, Social Media

The Social Good Summit has finally come to a close with one last exciting day featuring Barbara Bush, discussions on the Arab Spring and Mashable‘s Startups for Good Challenge.

There were great highlights from Day 4, which we’ve summed up for you here. If you’re interested in following what happened at the Summit, you can find a list of speakers and content online at the Summit Site.

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Announcements

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The big announcement on Thursday was that SunSaluter won the Startups for Good Challenge. SunSaluter is a piece of technology developed by 19-year-old Eden Full that rotates solar panels to face the sun — thereby increasing their output — without using any electricity. You can find a full list of the eight participating startups here.

The Summit received another surprise guest on Thursday, as Dr. Margarita Cedeno de Fernandez, First Lady of the Dominican Republic, stopped by to speak about how social media has helped connect her country. She said technology is a way for the government to engage with developing poor communities as well as empower women and spread literacy. She ended by saying: “Let me say goodbye to you now, and you will always be in my heart and my iPad.”

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Talking Points

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Barbara Bush started the day in conversation with Mashable‘s founder and CEO Pete Cashmore. She spoke about the need for more Americans to add philanthropy into their lives. “Young people are very curious about global challenges now, because we’ve seen through technology what’s happening around the world,” Bush said. “I think there’s a tremendous desire to do good in this generation and be entrepreneurial and think about things in a different way.”

Even though Thursday was dominated by the Startups for Good Challenge, the early sessions focused on social entrepreneurship and how social media is having an impact on the Arab world.

Shahinaz Ahmed, CEO of Education for Employment Foundation in Egypt, spoke about social media in the wake of Tahrir Square. Ahmed said there needs to be increased penetration of the Internet in developing communities before there can be any real change created via social media.

That theme was carried on by a panel discussing the Arab Spring. The focus was on how to empower and invest in Arab youths so they drive their communities and the economy instead of acting as a destabilizing force. Ronan Farrow, Special Adviser to the Secretary of State for Global Youth Issues spoke about U.S.-led programs to help create jobs for Arab youths. Neal Keny-Guyer, CEO of Mercy Corps, said the goal was is to treat youths as investments rather than problems.

Salman Shaikh, Director of the Brookings Doha Center, expressed concern that President Obama’s statements could jeopardize all the good work America has done in the region: “All of the good work that the United States is doing behind the scenes … if you mix the Arab-Israeli dealings with the Arab Awakening, [the U.S.] might come out as one of the biggest losers.”

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Interesting Stats

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Some of the most interesting stats came up through the Startups for Good Challenge. Catchafire, a service that pairs professionals with non-profits, said that 95% of non-profits are looking for pro-bono work but often can’t find the swathe of talented specialists willing to donate their time.

Sparked, a similar professional-to-non-profit service, shared that 74% of Americans don’t volunteer because they feel they don’t have enough time. This clashed dramatically against the amount of time that people spend on Facebook every day, approximately 9 minutes, according to Nielsen.

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Quote of the Day

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“There are many ways to prescribe happiness but there is one way that is available to everybody, it’s not very expensive … it’s very democratic, and everyone has acesss to it. It is: Find someone who needs help and help him for no ulterior motive.” — Yossi Vardi.

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Pictures from Day 4

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Take a look through these selected pictures from Day 4 at the Summit.

SEE ALSO: Social Good Summit: Day 3 [PICS]

Barbara Bush

Yossi Vardi, Pete Cashmore

Barbara Bush, Pete Cashmore

Pete Cashmore, Barbara Bush

Neal Keny-Guyer, Andrea Koppel, Yossi Vardi, Ronan Farrow

Shahinaz Ahmed Skypes In

Andrea Koppel, Neal Keny-Guyer, Salman Shaikh, Ronan Farrow

First Lady Margarita Cedeno de Fernandez, Aaron Sherinian

The Startups for Good Challenge

The Startups for Good Challenge

Startups for Good Challenge Winner Eden Full

The Summit Organizers Say Goodbye and Thank You

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Sponsored by Ericsson

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For more than a century, Ericsson has seen communications as a fundamental human right. Today, it is the leading provider of technology and services to network operators. Its networks connect 2 billion people and almost half of the world’s 5.5 billion mobile subscriptions. Now, Ericsson intends to do for broadband what it did for the telephone: make it mobile, available and affordable for all. Ericsson's vision is to be the prime driver of an all-communicating world, where information and communications technologies (ICT) come together to create a networked society. A networked society will bring many opportunities and challenges. As Ericsson works in the world, it aims to apply innovative solutions together with partners to make a real difference to peoples' lives, to business and to the economy, enabling change toward a more sustainable world. We call this Technology for Good.

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Sponsored by Ericsson

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More About: Social Good, social good summit, Social Media

For more Social Good coverage:

• Follow Mashable Social Good on Twitter
• Become a Fan on Facebook
• Subscribe to the Social Good channel
• Download our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad

In a seemingly usual move for a cosmetics company — not to mention a French one — Clarins launched a casual game on Facebook earlier this week called Spa Life.

Facebook games are not unusual among beauty brands, per se; MAC, for instance, launched a game called Cute Pinball to drive interactivity around its Quite Cute collection earlier this year. What’s unusual about Spa Life is that it’s set in an virtual world populated with avatars, aligning it more closely to games like Second Life and FarmVille than Cute Pinball.

Spa Life, which was built by game developer Freshplanet, is a time management game that recreates the challenges of running an actual spa. Players must manage an ever-increasing flow of visitors in search of pedicures, facials and the like, lest potential customers get impatient and leave the salon, damaging its reputation in the process.

The game is only lightly branded. In fact, players won’t have any interaction with Clarins product until roughly an hour into the game, when they can opt to treat their customers to Clarins rather than generic products to make them happier. Players are even incentivized to purchase upgrades using Facebook Credits (i.e. real cash) as they would be in a non-branded game.

Jonathan Zrihen, CEO and president of Clarins’s North American division, says it was the demographics of casual gamers on Facebook that first attracted him to the idea of developing a Clarins game. (According to an ISG survey last year, the average social gamer is a 43-year-old woman.)

“I knew about the craziness of Zynga games, but I didn’t realize the demographic was so much in line with the demographics of our products,” Zrihen says. “I was also impressed by the level of engagement these games create. So it was great to pair [Freshplanet's] expertise in gaming with our 50-plus years of experience managing spas.”

Although I didn’t get far enough in the game myself, Zrihen tells me that players can eventually redeem points acquired in the game for real products and samples from Clarins. The company is also considering attaching game points to Clarins products to encourage sales among those who become truly hooked on the game.

The goal is less about pushing online sales through the game, however, than about increasing Clarins’s fan base and engagement rate on Facebook.

“We don’t want to be pushy on this,” he says. “If we have more people following Clarins [on Facebook], it will have an effect on our ecommerce sales, but the main goal is to increase awareness of the brand. We want our [current] followers to play and invite their friends to play and become engaged.”

Although the game is already available to Clarins’s entire global fanbase, the company is working to localize the game for different markets. A version for France, for instance, will be translated into French and staged on a Parisian rather than an American street. More than 100,000 people have already installed the app on Facebook.

More About: beauty, clarins, cosmetics, Facebook, Gaming, Marketing

Facebook has unveiled its new Timeline profile pages, and they are a radical departure from the Facebook you know.

On the stage of the f8 developer conference in San Francisco, Mark Zuckerberg explained, “We're more than what we did recently," thus he and his team set out to create a Facebook experience where you could explore not just what your friends did today, but what your friends did last week, last month and last year.

The new Timeline is the answer to the problem of filling in the context of someone’s entire life. It is a moving mosaic of the photos, videos, places and status updates that make up not just your Facebook profile, but in a way, your personality. Facebook wants to chronicle your life, and now you can see the scrapbook.

We’ve had a chance to try out the new Facebook profiles and play with Timeline. The following are our first impressions of the new product, as well as screenshots of Facebook Timeline in action.

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Photos: Facebook Timeline

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The New Facebook Profile: Timeline

Timeline is a radical departure from previous versions of the Facebook user profile. The most prominent feature is the addition of a cover photo at the top of the page. Users can change this to whatever they'd like it to be.

1987

In 1987, my sister was born. Facebook knows these life events and includes them in your timeline.

Being Born

You can even add a picture and context to your birth, which starts the Timeline.

Timeline Interface

The Timeline is a two-column interface with top photos, status updates, friends and more.

Map

Facebook has added a feature that lets you see where you have visited. This is powered by Facebook Places.

Photos in the Timeline

Here's how photos are displayed in the Timeline.

Friends in the New Timeline

Here's what the Friends page looks like.

Changing Settings

Some of the new Timeline's customization features.

2009

More of the new Timeline

Getting Married

You can add life events, such as getting married, to your profile through the Publisher Bar. You can also announce that you broke a bone, got a new job, etc.

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Timeline: First Impressions

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Design: The Timeline interface is beautiful. The addition of the Cover Photo makes the Facebook interface more beautiful, and the timeline is easy on the eyes. While it will take some time to get used to the two-column layout, it actually is easier to navigate than the old Facebook. Facebook thought hard about the design of this change.

Interface: The interface works smoothly, though with bugs (it’s a developer preview). One problem is that you can’t easily get back to specific points in time on your timeline if you leave it to, say, look at a Facebook Page. There are some confusion

Places/Map: The new Map feature really gives users a reason to start checkin in with Facebook. You just feel like finding ways to add more to your map. It’s a nice way to see where your friends travel.

Photos: The new photos interface is simple and clean, though it isn’t sexy. It gets the job done, but leaves us wanting more.

Timeline: The timeline itself is a wonderful feature, but it can be confusing trying to find content. It takes time to load older years as well, when you’d prefer for it to load instantly. But as a discovery tool, it is really powerful, and as you populate it with more content, it will become more useful.

Publisher Bar: The updates to the Publisher Bar make it far more versatile. It allow you to not just add a status update, but add a job, get engaged, announce that you broke a bone and more. It uses Facebook’s new social actions and makes it so you can tell your friends about everything you do.

Problem of Getting Married Twice: We did run into one big problem with Facebook’s new Timeline — the “getting married twice” problem. As a test, I got married to @hermioneway on Facebook through the new Publisher Bar. It signaled that we were “married” in our feeds, but it didn’t actually update our profiles as “married.” To do that, we had to go into our Facebook profile settings to change it. Users shouldn’t have to do this twice, and most users won’t. It’s a problem that will confuse users terribly.

Conclusion: The new Timeline interface is beautiful and a major time sink. However, this is clearly not a finished product. The social network must do more to clean up actions on the Timeline and avoid the “getting married twice” problem.

Overall though, Facebook has made profiles more personal. Users are going to be spending hours in their friends’ Timelines.

Want to enable your own timeline now? Here’s how.

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More F8 Coverage:

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• Facebook Changes Again: Everything You Need To Know
• Prepare Yourselves: Facebook To Be Profoundly Changed
• Facebook Now Has 800 Million Users
• Facebook Timeline: Here's What It Looks Like [VIDEO]
• Facebook Open Graph Seeks to Deliver Real-Time Serendipity
• Yahoo Hooks Up With Facebook for Socially Curated News
• Facebook Adds TV & Movies to the Stream
• What Do You Think of the Facebook Changes? [OPEN THREAD]
• Facebook Reveals Major Updates at F8 [LIVE BLOG]
• Facebook Timeline Redefines User Profiles
• Spotify Comes to Facebook [PICS]

More About: Facebook, facebook timeline, mark zuckerberg, press conference

The Washington Post Company has released Social Reader, a newspaper for Facebook.

The Social Reader application, built on Facebook’s new Open Graph, offers users a personalized news reading experience, with front page stories pulled from The Post and its content partners.

Social Reader stories reflect a user’s Facebook profile, interests, “likes” and the stories his friends are reading, as well as trending news topics.

"The Washington Post Social Reader is a way for people to connect around the day's latest happenings and discover real-time news with their friends on Facebook,” Donald Graham, chairman and CEO of The Washington Post Company says. “If you know that several of your friends have read a story, you'll be more interested in it.”

On the front page, stories are displayed as condensed news blurbs with accompanying artwork. Application users can click to view the article in full on Facebook, without being redirected to the source’s site or needing to be a paying subscriber.

Once the user reads an article, the activity is shared with friends and included in the Facebook ticker. The application also recommends additional related stories, and better understands the user’s preferences with repeat usage.

Social Reader places a strong emphasis on news discovery through friends. The “Friends Using Social Reader” section includes the Facebook profile photos of a user’s friends also using the app, and the user can click on a photo to view what a friend is reading. “The What People Are Reading” section is akin to a News Feed and highlights what the user’s Facebook friends are reading via the app in real time.

Content is sourced from the complete digital collections of a dozen different media companies. The Associated Press, Express Night Out, Foreign Policy, GlobalPost, The A.V. Club, Reuters, The Root, SB Nation, Slate, Sugar Inc., WetPaint Entertainment and Mashable are content partners at launch.

Also notable is that Social Reader is ad free — readers get full access to news stories without paywalls or banner ads getting in the way. For now, Graham says he’s satisfied with focusing on creating a rich and compelling news reading experience for Facebook users.

“We’re trying to get the product right. We’re trying to get market share. We’re trying to see how big we can make it,” Graham says. “I want the whole company to learn about social reading and social news,” he adds. “This is part of the future of news.”

Social Reader was announced at Facebook’s f8 conference on Thursday. The Post collaborated with Facebook and its content partners on the initiative and is using Trove, the company’s personalized news aggregation site, to power the experience.

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More F8 Coverage:

---

• Prepare Yourselves: Facebook To Be Profoundly Changed
• Facebook Now Has 800 Million Users
• Facebook Timeline: Here's What It Looks Like [VIDEO]
• Facebook Open Graph Seeks to Deliver Real-Time Serendipity
• Yahoo Hooks Up With Facebook for Socially Curated News
• Facebook Adds TV & Movies to the Stream
• What Do You Think of the Facebook Changes? [OPEN THREAD]
• Facebook Reveals Major Updates at F8 [LIVE BLOG]
• Facebook Timeline Redefines User Profiles
• Spotify Comes to Facebook [PICS]

Disclosure: Mashable is content partner.

More About: Facebook, Social Reader, the washington post

You’ve been hearing about all the wonderful new Facebook features, and like us, you’re probably super-eager to get started with them.

If you’re willing to go through a series of eight steps, you can get into the brand-new Facebook Timeline right now.

Simply follow the instructions in our gallery below, and suddenly you’ll be basking in a new world of Facebook goodness, just like the developers are. Follow the instructions carefully, and good luck.

First, you’ll need to go to the Facebook developer page, which is a part of your Facebook account. Make sure you’re logged into your Facebook account, and then simply follow this link to get started.

Step 1

1. When you get here, click "allow."

Step 2

2. Click "create new app"

Step 3

3. Name it whatever you want, and give it whatever namespace you'd like -- it doesn't matter. Click the checkbox "I agree to the platform privacy policy." And then click Continue, pass the security check by filling in the Captcha, and you'll be ready for the next step.

Step 4

4. After you've verified yourself as a human, you'll reach this screen, where you'll need to click "Open Graph" on the left side.

Step 5

5. You'll see the next screen, entitled "Get Started with Open Graph" -- fill in anything you want (it doesn't matter) in those fields under the heading "start by defining one action than one object for your app." Click Get Started.

Step 6

6. On this screen, do nothing except scroll to the bottom and click "Save Changes and Next." Do the same thing on the next screen.

Step 7

7. You'll be taken to this screen. Wait a few minutes, and then go to your Facebook homepage. That's where you'll be invited to enable Timeline. Be patient at this point -- sometimes it requires you to wait before the changes take effect.

Step 8

8. When you go back to your Facebook homepage, you'll see this. Success! Click Get It Now, and you're in!

You've Done It!

Here's where you fiddle with your timeline, set it up the way you like it, and when you click Publish Now, your Timeline goes live. Or, you can wait until Thursday, September 29, 2011, and it'll go live on its own. If you want to get into your timeline from another computer, the address for this developer's version is located at this URL: http://www.facebook.com/[yourusername]?sk=timeline and of course [yourusername] is your own Facebook user name.

[via CNET]

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More F8 Coverage:

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• Facebook Changes Again: Everything You Need To Know
• Prepare Yourselves: Facebook To Be Profoundly Changed
• Facebook Now Has 800 Million Users
• Facebook Timeline: Here's What It Looks Like [VIDEO]
• Facebook Open Graph Seeks to Deliver Real-Time Serendipity
• Yahoo Hooks Up With Facebook for Socially Curated News
• Facebook Adds TV & Movies to the Stream
• What Do You Think of the Facebook Changes? [OPEN THREAD]
• Facebook Reveals Major Updates at F8 [LIVE BLOG]
• Facebook Timeline Redefines User Profiles
• Spotify Comes to Facebook [PICS]

More About: Facebook, How-To, Open Graph, timeline

In her first press conference after she took the helm of HP, new CEO Meg Whitman vowed to stay the course set by her predecessor, former CEO Leo Apotheker.

She wants to continue the purchase of British software company Autonomy for the eye-popping price of $10.3 billion, and continue to explore the breakup or spinoff of the company’s PC division, according to the Wall Street Journal.

"We're going to get to a decision as fast as possible” on the PC division, Whitman said according to CNET. “A decision like this is not like fine wine, it doesn't get better with age."

Given that controversial stance, what would you do if you were in her shoes? Let’s have a poll:

More About: ceo, HP, meg whitman, polls

For more Business coverage:

• Follow Mashable Business on Twitter
• Become a Fan on Facebook
• Subscribe to the Business channel
• Download our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad

Facebook’s bold list of changes, announced Thursday, will put more pressure on advertisers to come up with compelling content and integrate themselves further into consumers’ lives. The big loser? The “Like,” which will have a smaller role in marketing, industry analysts say.

One big change is that Facebook has added a control in the top right of each story that users can check to unmark a top story. Facebook will use that information over time to automatically edit the feeds. Since users now have more control over their news feeds, brands with boring or irrelevant updates will have lower visibility. (They will still show up in the Ticker, however.)

Marketers, who have been told for years that they’re actually publishers now, will have to put that into practice, says Ian Schafer, CEO of Deep Focus, a digital marketing firm. “Facebook is a channel, albeit a collaborative one, that needs to be programmed,” says Schafer. “We need to get people to share and interact with more content.”

How to do that? David Berkowitz, senior director of emerging media and innovation for 360i, says Facebook will now be about branding actions. “Before on Facebook it was about getting people to ‘Like’ the brand,” he says. “Now, it’s about getting people to take social actions enabled by that brand.” For example, if a consumer posts an update about a run they just took, that’s a prime opportunity for Nike. “If your run is powered by Nike, you might still wear Adidas,” says Berkowitz, “but Adidas will have to find something else that’s social about its brand to become part of your story.”

Nir Refuah, vice president of McCann Digital in Israel, says that with Facebook’s redesign, consumers will be creating a “digital autobiography” in which brands will have to integrate themselves. “First Facebook became the digital ID of everyone, and now it will try to gather our whole life story,” says Refuah.

The emphasis on lifestreaming rather than merely using the platform to amplify a message means that apps will become more of a vehicle for branding. But, like the marketing messaging, Schafer says apps will also have to be genuinely interesting to consumers and their friends. “Apps with utility that allow you to consume more or participate more will be more important,” says Schafer.

Thinking of marketing as storytelling isn’t a new concept, but the redesign will extend the metaphor. Sponsored Stories, an ad unit Facebook introduced earlier this year, are a good example, Schafer says, of marketing messages that could be of interest to consumers and their friends. How? Instead of offering basic information, like “Jim checked in at Starbucks,” Schafer suggests that something more specific such as “Jim checked in at the Starbucks on 14th Street and ordered a cappuccino,” might be a relevant part of that consumer’s life that day and of interest to friends.

The change will require new thinking from marketers who had merely tried to accumulate as many fans and “Likes” as possible. Jenna Lebel,managing director of strategy at Likeable Media, says the “Like” is “a little less relevant now,” and that marketers will have to work harder to earn their place in news feeds. “Your content is going to need to be absolutely amazing,” she says.

Colin Murphy, social media director at Skinny, a digital ad agency, thinks overall, the changes are a challenge to marketers and agencies. “He really threw down the gauntlet today,” Murphy says of Mark Zuckerberg. “You actually have to deliver something of value to a customer rather than just being a person spamming.”

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Here’s a look at the new Timeline, and you can view images from the event below.

Andy Samberg and Mark Zuckerberg

Beast's Facebook Page

Ben Parr and Jennifer Van Grove

F8 programing team

Zuck Dog

Beast

Before f8 Keynote

"I'm not really friends with these people"

Andy Samberg

Andy Samberg

Timeline Mobile

Mark's Timeline

Mark Zuckerberg

A View of Timeline from the Audience

Courtesy of Robyn Peterson

Mark with Timeline

Zuckerberg's Cover

Timeline

Timeline

Timeline

"Any Verb, Any Noun"

Reed Hastings

Reed Hastings

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek

Watch Netflix and Hulu from Facebook

Nike+

Mark Zuckerberg and Words With Friends

Washington Post Social Reader

Running and Eating

Brett Taylor

Brett Taylor

Chris Cox

Chris Cox

Facebook Memories

Mark Zuckerberg Closes F8

Mark Zuckerberg Closes F8

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More F8 Coverage:

---

• Facebook Changes Again: Everything You Need To Know
• Prepare Yourselves: Facebook To Be Profoundly Changed
• Facebook Now Has 800 Million Users
• Facebook Timeline: Here's What It Looks Like [VIDEO]
• Facebook Open Graph Seeks to Deliver Real-Time Serendipity
• Yahoo Hooks Up With Facebook for Socially Curated News
• Facebook Adds TV & Movies to the Stream
• What Do You Think of the Facebook Changes? [OPEN THREAD]
• Facebook Reveals Major Updates at F8 [LIVE BLOG]
• Facebook Timeline Redefines User Profiles
• Spotify Comes to Facebook [PICS]

More About: Advertising, Facebook, Marketing

For more Business coverage:

• Follow Mashable Business on Twitter
• Become a Fan on Facebook
• Subscribe to the Business channel
• Download our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad

This Thursday saw a solar-powered startup named the winner of Mashable‘s Startups for Good Challenge.

SunSaluter is developed by 19-year-old Eden Full (pictured). The system rotates solar panels to face the sun, increasing their potential efficiency by up to 40%. Most impressively, the technology works passively, meaning without using any kind of electricity, through a series of inexpensive metal coils that expand and contract based on a series of outside factors.

SunSaluter beat out seven other phenomenal projects through a process that was lovingly called a “Shark Tank for Social Good.” All eight startups presented their ideas to four judges: the UN Foundation’s Aaron Sherinian, Mashable‘s Sarah Kessler, renowned entrepreneur Yossi Vardi, and the Economist‘s Matthew Bishop. Each presentation was followed by a series of tough questions and light-hearted ribbing.

Sherinian proclaimed himself the “Paula Abdul” of the panel while tweets likened Bishop to the panel’s Simon Cowell: Tough but fair.

As part of her prize, Full will take home $10,000 and a social good award from the UN Foundation. You can find a full list of participants here.

More About: Social Good, social good summit, Startups, startups for good challenge

For more Social Good coverage:

• Follow Mashable Social Good on Twitter
• Become a Fan on Facebook
• Subscribe to the Social Good channel
• Download our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad

The only question hotter right now than which Republican candidate will face President Obama in the 2012 election is: What new technology will define the race?

Next year's candidates will be expected to increase their digital presences beyond major platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and the president's social network, My.BarackObama.com (MyBO). So, what channels are politico tech geeks watching?

With millions of potential voters using mobile devices, strategists would be remiss to write off QR codes as a risky early-adopter consumer trend untranslatable to the political space.

SEE ALSO: HOW TO: Use QR Codes for Event Marketing

"What we notice in the political space is that it's three to five years behind your normal corporate brand area," says George Alafoginis, a digital strategist for Washington D.C.-based New Media Strategies and former deputy director of new media for the Republican National Committee. "One of the exciting things about 2012 is that we have the opportunity to close the loop between online activities and real-world events," he adds. "We're seeing individuals rely on their phones, and QR codes present an optimal framework for that. There's an opportunity for campaigns to reach out to mobile-savvy individuals and transmit a message that will lead to an activation."

There is great potential in branding candidates, fundraising and collecting supporters' data using QR technology. Consider how its campaign implementation could yield results.

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1. Field Organizing

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In 2008, the Obama campaign doubled down on its field operations. Using technology and MyBO, supporters were able to organize registration drives, canvas door-to-door to recruit potential voters, and phone bank from home. By the 2010 midterm elections, conservative organizers were using the Twitter hashtag #tcot, rumored to be the early rumblings of the Tea Party. They ultimately moved to organizing tools like MeetUp, which fueled their big ballot box wins in various Congressional races.

However, there's nothing like in-person interactions to attract new supporters. This cycle, QR codes could serve as an on-the-street campaign that instantly recruits supporters to rallies, speeches, visibility events and canvassing. The key is to make sure the QR code allows for action – such as connecting with a supporter in another state, pledging to canvass or phone bank, engaging candidates or celebrity surrogates, or receiving cool merch.

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2. Donations

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The spotlight was on small donors throughout the 2008 fundraising effort. These donations were largely collected via email solicitation. Imagine how this type of outreach could be bolstered via real-life interaction.

Formerly, a canvasser would target a neighborhood, campus or street festival, and ask for supporter pledge cards. He or she would assume responsibility for collecting and delivering those funds. Instead that canvasser could solicit $5 donations via a direct mobile QR transaction. The experience would also be social: the contributor instantly shares her donation across social networks and encourages friends to match her donation.

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3. Endorsements

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Campaigns are always looking for ways to utilize their celebrity supporters. QR codes could be a chance to get creative: Provide access to exclusive content, such as funny or moving videos, tweets, pics and merch from a celeb. With more codes emerging that integrate specific design art, celeb supporters will also have access to tailor-made QR images specific to their sentiments and brand identities. That means they'll be more encouraged to share across their networks and with fans at live events.

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4. Merchandise

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Candidates should tack a QR code to their yard signs, bumper stickers, T-shirts and other physical campaign promotions. Like past inclusion of Twitter and Facebook handles on promotional materials, by election day 2012, QR codes will be a cultural norm.

Why not make cross-promotion more personalized and action oriented? If college kids are heading to a football game, they could be waving team pendants that sport candidate QR codes, not to mention posting pictures on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Gowalla, etc. By regionalizing the QR code's look and the reward, the merch turns making a statement into a measurable social action for like-minded individuals.

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5. Get Out the Vote

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In several states, like Colorado, it's possible to register to vote online. QR codes could be a valuable tool for campaigns looking to tap into voting blocs once thought difficult to reach. Think about it this way: Since 2008, about one-third of young voters have moved and need to re-register at a current address, according to U.S. census data. Likewise, research indicates that millions of highly-sought after Hispanic voters are accessing mobile devices.

Reaching out to these groups using viral QR code campaigns would make registration more accessible to potential supporters – especially to those who grew up with iPhones, and therefore, may not even know how to register via snail mail. States with online registration policies will likely see an uptick in participation this cycle, but QR codes developed by campaigns and third-party advocacy groups like Rock the Vote and others, can maximize the tool to bolster awareness efforts.

While the measurable effectiveness of these opportunities remains relatively unproven for large-scale campaigns, we're seeing candidates experiment with the potential. Consulting groups are popping up too, offering services aimed at political campaigns.

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One thing is certain: The tech-fueled election of 2008 changed political campaigning forever. And even though the pace of change in developers’ garages far exceeds that of Washington, strategists know they'll need to take advantage of tech in 2012.

"Both parties have done a good job of recognizing there's a shift in how we communicate and receive information," says Alafoginis, adding that he is advising his political clients to incorporate QR in their tactical arsenal. "If I'm running a campaign I'm trying to use tools best suited to get my candidates elected."

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, 221A

More About: 2012 election, features, Marketing, Mobile, Politics, QR Codes

As we predicted, Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote at the f8 conference in San Francisco Thursday introduced some of the most profound changes seen on Facebook since its inception. So many changes, in fact, that it can be hard to keep track. So here’s a handy-dandy guide.

1. You’re going to get a Timeline — a scrapbook of your life. In a complete overhaul of its ever-evolving profile page, Facebook is introducing Timeline. This is a stream of information about you — the photos you’ve posted, all your status updates, the apps you’ve used, even the places you’ve visited on a world map — that scrolls all the way back to your birth. It encourages you to post more stuff about your past, such as baby pictures, using Facebook as a scrapbook.

The further back in Timeline you go, the more Facebook will compress the information so that you’re only seeing the most interesting parts of your history. You can customize this by clicking on a star next to a status, say, or enlarging a picture.

Timeline is in beta now, and will be opt-in to start. In the long run, it will become the new default profile page.

2. You don’t have to just Like something — now you can [verb] any [noun]. Remember when all you could do to something on Facebook — a video, a comment, a product, a person — was Like it? Pretty soon that’s going to seem laughably antiquated. The social network has launched Facebook Gestures, which means that Facebook’s partners and developers can turn any verb into a button.

So you’ll start seeing the option to tell the world you’re Reading a particular book, for example, or Watching a given movie, or Listening to a certain tune. In turn, as many observers have pointed out, this is likely to lead to an explosion of oversharing — and far more information on your friends’ activities showing up in your news feed than you probably cared to know.

3. Facebook apps need only ask permission once to share stories on your behalf. Although not as big a deal as the Timeline, this tweak may be one of the more controversial. Previously, apps had to ask every time they shared information about you in your profile. Now, the first time you authorize the app, it will tell you what it’s going to share about you. If you’re cool with that, the app never has to ask you again.

But you don’t have to worry about this app stuff clogging your news feed, because …

4. All “lightweight” information is going to the Ticker. Status updates, photos from a wedding or a vacation, changes in relationship status: these are the kinds of things you want to see from your friends when you look at your news feed. Who killed whom in Mafia Wars? Who planted what in FarmVille? Not so much. So that kind of trivial detail has been banished to the Ticker, a real-time list of things your friends are posting now that scrolls down the side of your screen.

5. You can watch TV and movies, listen to music, and read news with your friends — all within Facebook. Starting today, thanks to a whole bunch of partnerships, there are a lot more things you can do without ever having to leave Facebook. You can watch a show on Hulu, listen to a song on Spotify, or check out a story on Yahoo News (or Mashable, via the Washington Post‘s Social Read app). The ticker will tell you what your friends are watching, listening to or reading, allowing you to share the experience with them by clicking on a link.

The upshot: a brand-new kind of media-based peer pressure. On stage, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings — a launch partner — revealed that he had only just decided to watch Breaking Bad because Facebook’s Ticker told him a colleague was watching it. Netflix’s own algorithm had been recommending the show to him for years, but that was never reason enough for Hastings.

6. Facebook has more users and more engagement than ever. We got two interesting nuggets of information out of Zuckerberg (and the Zuckerberg-impersonating Andy Samberg): Facebook has hit 800 million users, and most of them are active. The social network just saw a new record for the most visitors in one day: an eye-popping 500 million.

Indeed, the whole impression left by the event was that of a confident, fast-evolving company that is becoming ever more professional, and Zuckerberg’s stage show bore more than a little resemblance to an Apple keynote. It’s going to be interesting to see what Google+ can do to keep up.

More About: f8, f8 2011, Facebook, Google, mark zuckerberg

HP made the widely anticipated move today of ousting Leo Apotheker and installing former eBay CEO Meg Whitman as its new chief executive. The news hit the wires late in the afternoon, after the close of trading.

A little while later, HP employees received their first e-mail from their new leader. In it, Whitman and HP Executive Chairman Ray Lane express their belief in “the future of HP.” They characterize Apotheker's ouster as him “stepping down” as president and CEO and “resigning” his post as director. Whitman and Lane grant the difficulty of change and say that they made a “difficult decision.”

The e-mail, however goes on to say that this change is “absolutely necessary for the success of the company.” Top priority for the new leadership, the letter states, is to focus on the company mission and performance. The e-mail contains no mention of specific products or divisions, but it does say that Whitman and Lane want to “invest in innovation, leverage the strength of our core businesses, enhance our software capabilities and integrate our assets to maximize the value of our investments.”

The full text of the e-mail is below.

TO/ All HP Employees
FROM/ Meg Whitman and Ray Lane

We are writing today as the new CEO and executive chairman of HP.

First let us say that we are true believers in the future of HP. We have always had enormous respect for HP and its well-earned iconic status as one of the most important technology companies in the world. We look forward to working with you as we take HP to the next level.

As you may have seen in the press release we issued earlier today, Léo Apotheker has stepped down as president, chief executive officer and resigned as a director of the company. We very much appreciate Léo's efforts and his service to HP since his appointment last year.

In addition, Ray Lane has been appointed executive chairman of the board of directors. This means that Ray will play a more active role in guiding the company. To ensure good governance practices, HP also intends to appoint a lead independent director soon.

We know that change is difficult. The decision to change the leadership of HP is one the board took seriously. We assure you that it was a difficult decision – and one that was made after careful and thoughtful deliberation – but one the board believes is absolutely necessary for the success of the company.

HP is a leading technology company with a real purpose and the ability to positively impact the way the world works. We all recognize that the technology landscape is changing rapidly and we have to do more than simply adapt. We must invest in innovation, leverage the strength of our core businesses, enhance our software capabilities and integrate our assets to maximize the value of our investments. We believe in HP's strategy, and we are confident that together, with renewed focus and energy, we will deliver on our priorities for our stockholders, customers and other stakeholders.

Our hallways are filled with the industry's brightest and most talented people. We believe we all understand that we have a lot of hard work ahead of us. Each and every one of you contributes to our success. The board wants to continue proving to our customers, partners and stockholders why HP is – and should remain – a leader in our industry.

A top priority for us will be to refocus the energy of the organization on our mission and on the performance necessary to accomplish it. We need you to be the ambassadors of HP and work both collaboratively and effectively to usher HP into the future. To reach that goal, we need your best work and a focus on execution.

We believe that HP matters. It matters to Silicon Valley, California, the United States and the world. We will maintain and build upon our proud and deep-rooted legacy. We understand the strength of this company, and we know we have the right tools and the talented people to achieve our goals and execute our strategy.

We want to hear directly from you. Good ideas come from everyone, so please send any thoughts you would like to share to employee survey. We also invite you to join Meg tomorrow at 9:00 a.m. Pacific Time as we discuss this announcement. Details for the meeting will follow shortly.

We look forward to working with all of you. Thank you for your ongoing and deep commitment to HP.

Sincerely,

Meg and Ray

More About: HP, meg whitman

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Facebook Timeline sounds like a good idea. It's your life, organized and summarized for public consumption — or as public as you want to make it. It's your own two-hour biopic on a single page. It will, ultimately, replace Facebook's profiles, to become the way we view each other on the popular social networking service.

It may also be Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's biggest risk since launching the social network in 2004.

Facebook calls these grand changes an effort to "Recover the Past". It's true, finding what you posted on Facebook on Day One is hard, and sifting through all you've said and done to find what's important is even harder. Personally, I love history and agree that it's devastating to see so much of our life histories lost to the sands of time.

Those with the richest histories, though, probably aren't even on Facebook or very active in the service. They likely see Facebook as an inconsequential bother that they'd rather ignore. Timeline, which honestly looks more complex than current profiles, certainly won't encourage 75-year-old Aunt Mae to share her childhood pictures and stories of growing up poor in Romania.

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A Matter of Trust

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I don't know if anyone is ready to trust Facebook's algorithm to decide what to show and hide as the Timeline grows. Up top is full of minutiae. Down below, it's an outline. But what Facebook deems important: — a birth, first steps, new job — may only be the highlights. Will it know that the hat I wore in four or five pictures six years ago was important to me because a dearly departed relative gave it to me? I'll have a recollection of the hat, but have a harder time finding it in Timeline if Facebook deems it less important. To be fair, though, it's not clear just how much editing we'll be able to do on our timelines. The better question might be, who would want to spend time editing them, anyway?

The reality is that the story of most people's lives in Facebook's Timeline will be a relatively short one. If they joined in 2008, then they have a three year history. If they joined last week, well, they're just babies, in Facebook Timeline terms. Zuckerberg said you can go back through the Timeline and fill in all your historical details. Most people have a hard time filling out even their most basic information on Facebook and other social service. I run a across a lot of empty or skeletal profiles on Facebook and Google+. People fill in the details when there's a real value proposition. So LinkedIn has some of the richest profiles because every bit of work history you enter could help you network to the next big job. What is the great benefit in Facebook?

Some might argue that Facebook Timelines and the new Open Graph that will work with it are simply new ways for Mark Zuckerberg to mine your data. It's a fair argument. Numerous times throughout the presentation, Zuckerberg and other Facebook execs talked about patterns. You know who likes data patterns? Marketers and advertisers, who also happen to be Facebook's partners.

Granted, the real-time stuff that Open Graph will make possible, like watching movies together and listening to music with your Facebook friends, will not be front and center in the Facebook Timeline. They'll be part of your real-time activity. But this activity will be collected in the Timeline as a history that becomes part of your Timeline. Over time, you build a pattern within the Open Graph app and with those who are, say, sharing the same activity with you.

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Patterns

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These patterns and group sharing will appeal to some. It certainly appeals to everyone in Facebook's corporate offices. Mark Zuckerberg loves it because he's 27 and his world revolves around innovation. He loves new features. Timeline is the biggest new Facebook feature of all. Yet, Mark's Facebook users are not all like him. Many are middle-aged and are less interested in the new than they are what simply works. The youngest generation, those who live their lives out loud online, may heartily embrace Timelines, but older generations are less interested in what they did 10 or 20 years ago and more concerned with what's happening now.

Zuckerberg should keep in mind that Facebook succeeded with the Moms and Dads who traditionally left "the new" to their kids. They use Facebook almost as much as their kids and when the kids have moved onto the next new thing, they're still in Facebook getting real-time information about stuff that matters today. Though studies show that your mom might represent the typical social gamer, the moms I know are not using Facebook social apps or wondering how they can tell their life stories on the service. Instead they’re trading new photos, jokes and rumors about which teachers are getting tenure and intelligence how one might get her son into a closed-out SAT course.

With Timeline, and to a certain extent Open Graph, Mark Zuckerberg is once again racing forward to the next big thing. Let's hope that he doesn't inadvertently leave his users behind.

What do you think of Facebook Timeline and Open Graph? Tell us in the open thread and by voting in the accompanying poll.

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More F8 Coverage:

---

• Prepare Yourselves: Facebook To Be Profoundly Changed
• Facebook Now Has 800 Million Users
• Facebook Timeline: Here's What It Looks Like [VIDEO]
• Facebook Open Graph Seeks to Deliver Real-Time Serendipity
• Yahoo Hooks Up With Facebook for Socially Curated News
• Facebook Adds TV & Movies to the Stream
• What Do You Think of the Facebook Changes? [OPEN THREAD]
• Facebook Reveals Major Updates at F8 [LIVE BLOG]
• Facebook Timeline Redefines User Profiles
• Spotify Comes to Facebook [PICS]

More About: Facebook, facebook timeline

The Consumer Trends Series is supported by CBS.com, where brands can find engagement with the ideal audience through exclusive news, clips, trailers and more. To connect your brands with true enthusiasm, visit CBSInteractive.com/ideal.

Practically since the birth of television, consumers have enjoyed watching feature-length movies at home. In the early years, movie studios worried that television broadcasts would cannibalize cineplex ticket sales. In time, however, studios learned that home viewing not only didn’t have a substantial impact on box office sales — the home video market could thrive as an additional source of revenue.

Today, consumers can watch movies at home in any number of ways, including through disc rental, digital download, subscription streaming, digital rental and even disc or digital purchase. Market research firm Mintel published a report in May 2011 that takes a closer look at movie consumption at home.

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Consumers Are Shifting From Owning to Renting/Subscribing

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The home video market — that is, the market for home video or digital purchases and rentals — has been in decline for the last six years.

Mintel reports that sales have dropped 13% between 2006 and 2010 and that the decline has accelerated over the last two years. Revenues declined in 2009 and 2010, even as the number of transactions for pre-recorded content was on the increase.

That revenue decline shows that consumers are slowly but surely moving away from a “buy to own” market and finding more value in rentals. Even as traditional video stores like Blockbuster have languished, rent-by-mail and rental kiosk business models have continued to thrive.

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Digital is Slowly Replacing Physical Discs

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While physical discs still rule, consumers are slowly but surely moving into the realm of digital downloads and digital streaming.

Although digitally distributed movies (not including streaming) grew by 5.7 market-share points between 2008 and 2010, that still represented just 13.3% of home video entertainment spending in 2010.

To combat the decline of disc sales, movie studios frequently package digital versions of a film alongside the physical DVD or Blu-ray disc.

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Disruptive Rental Models Challenge Studios

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When the home video market started to decline in 2005 and 2006, the major movie studios were caught off-guard. For nearly a decade, home video sales — and home video ownership — were continuing to increase.

When the DVD boom in the late 1990s hit the market, movie studios were able to get out from under the various rental agreements that plagued home VHS sales. In other words, rather than selling a VHS tape to Blockbuster for $119.99 (which was once the high price of first access to new rental releases), and then, some months later, sell a cheaper home video release, studios found that they could sell the discs to customers for just $14 or $15 a piece.

As the DVD era ended, however, the battle between Blu-ray and HD-DVD as the successor format to DVD caused many customers to put off upgrading their technology and gave digital downloads and distribution an opportunity to gain ground. When Blu-ray finally was declared the winning format, for many customers, it was too late.

Studios hope to gain the upper-hand in the future with Ultra Violet, a new cloud-based delivery model that will allow customers to access their digital purchases from multiple devices and locations, without needing the physical disc.

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Consumers Love Streaming

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More than digital downloads, digital and subscription streaming has had a profound impact on how consumers watch movies. According to Mintel, 25% of adult respondents (with Internet access) have a Netflix subscription, and 88% of those users use the streaming library.

Keep in mind, this survey took place before Netflix raised its prices and separated its streaming and rental properties, but the fact that 1 in 4 adults subscribe to the service underscores the popularity of streaming as a business model and consumption habit.

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TV and Premium Cable Still Matter

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Of course, the most popular way to watch movies remains through broadcast television and cable. According to Mintel, 67% of its surveyed users said they watched a movie via cable or broadcast TV in the last two weeks. In second place, 44% of users said they watched a movie via a premium cable network like HBO and in third place, 38% said they rented a physical disc.

Perhaps the more interesting takeaway is that consumers frequently watched content associated with a flat monthly rate. That means that whether it was via an HBO subscription or via a Netflix streaming account, users were more likely to watch content on a subscription basis, as opposed to an a la carte basis.

Mintel’s report was completed before HBO rolled out HBO Go, the first widely available TV Everywhere initiative. HBO Go has been tremendously effective, in part because it builds on two of the hottest trends amongst consumers: subscription streaming and watching premium cable content.

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Your Thoughts

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Does Mintel’s study match your own home movie watching habits? Do you still rent movies every weekend or have you shifted to cable, on-demand and digital? Do you still buy Blu-ray discs every Tuesday or do you just do digital rentals or downloads of must-see flicks? Let us know in the comments.

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Series Supported by CBS.com

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The Consumer Trends Series is supported by CBS.com, where you can find engagement with the ideal audience at the #1 TV Network site. To see how our exclusive clips, web originals, full episodes and more can connect your brands with true enthusiasm – and an audience of up to 230 million – visit CBSInteractive.com/ideal.

Photo courtesy of Christina Warren

More About: Consumer Trends Series, features, mashable, mintel, netflix, subscription streaming, tv everywhere

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At Facebook‘s f8 conference in San Francisco on Thursday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a major overhaul of the social network’s user profiles.

The new profile will feature a timeline that compiles your Facebook participation history like a scrapbook. Expect your entire profile page to look completely different. Photos will be bigger and new interactive options will abound.

SEE ALSO: Facebook's Latest Changes: A Hands-On Look [PICS]

In the spirit of the profile redesign, we’ve compiled a gallery that charts the evolution of the ubiquitous profile, from its humble beginnings as “The Facebook” in 2005 to the profile timeline introduced today, in 2011.

What do you think of all these big changes? Sound off in our open thread.

2005 - The Facebook

Back in the days when The Facebook was only available to select networks, the News Feed didn't exist. Users hopped between profiles like this one.

2006 - Mini-Feed

With the September 2006 launch of Facebook's News Feed, user profiles contained mini-feeds that displayed user activity.

2007 - Interaction

While not a huge year for profile redesign, users began to interact more with each other's profiles -- remember Facebook Gifts?

2008 - The App Era

Users were able to add application tabs to their profiles (e.g. Bumper Stickers). Facebook also introduced the Publisher tool bar, which allowed a user to publish a status update, photo or link to his profile.

2009 - Pages

A new kind of user profile, Pages launched in 2009. Users could "become a fan" of a Page (until 2010, when they could "like" a page) to see that individual's or business' updates in their news feed.

2010 - A Visual Redesign

Late in 2010, Facebook launched a new profile that, up until this week, remained pretty much unaltered. Users took advantage by getting creative with the new photo banner at the top of the page. Also, Facebook told you what friends/fans you had in common in the upper right-hand corner of each page.

2011 - Ticker

As of Sept. 20, Facebook's new ticker has the ability to follow a user around to every page, including profiles. The company also introduced a "View As" widget in the upper right-hand corner that allows a user to preview how others see her page.

2011 - Timeline

Announced Thursday at Facebook's f8 conference, the new profile will act like a virtual scrapbook, featuring important milestones that have occurred since your time on Facebook. Compared to the evolution of the social network's profile thus far, this redesign appears the most significant.

Additional Google-Fu was contributed to this post by Josh Catone.

More About: Facebook, features, redesign, Social Media, trending

Will the real Mark Zuckerberg please stand up? Wait a minute — that’s Saturday Night Live’s Andy Samberg standing in for the Facebook CEO at the f8 keynote, all in good fun.

Our favorite moment’s at 5:00: Samberg’s “new” Facebook feature for “I’m not really friends with these people.”

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More F8 Coverage:

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• Prepare Yourselves: Facebook To Be Profoundly Changed
• Facebook Now Has 800 Million Users
• Facebook Timeline: Here's What It Looks Like [VIDEO]
• Facebook Open Graph Seeks to Deliver Real-Time Serendipity
• Yahoo Hooks Up With Facebook for Socially Curated News
• Facebook Adds TV & Movies to the Stream
• What Do You Think of the Facebook Changes? [OPEN THREAD]
• Facebook Reveals Major Updates at F8 [LIVE BLOG]
• Facebook Timeline Redefines User Profiles
• Spotify Comes to Facebook [PICS]

More About: f8, keynote, Samberg, Zuckerberg

Meg Whitman has officially been named the CEO of Hewlett Packard, following several days of speculation that Leo Apotheker would be forced out of the computing giant and possibly replaced by the former eBay CEO and California gubernatorial candidate.

In a statement, HP also said that Ray Lane has been promoted to executive chairman of the company’s board of directors. In a statement, Lane said, “We are at a critical moment and we need renewed leadership to successfully implement our strategy and take advantage of the market opportunities ahead. Meg is a technology visionary with a proven track record of execution. She is a strong communicator who is customer focused with deep leadership capabilities.” Whitman had been serving on HP’s board for the past eight months.

Apotheker’s departure comes just 11 months after he joined the company in the wake of the Mark Hurd scandal. His tenure had been shaky from the start, with criticism intensifying recently over his plan to spin off HP’s personal computer business and discontinue the TouchPad tablet.

Although HP’s statement on the matter says Aptoheker resigned his position, it seems all but certain that the decision was not his, with media reports surfacing earlier this week that HP’s board was meeting to discuss an exit. Lane also did little to hide the board’s feelings towards Apotheker. “The board believes that the job of the HP CEO now requires additional attributes to successfully execute on the company's strategy. Meg Whitman has the right operational and communication skills and leadership abilities to deliver improved execution and financial performance,” he said.

More About: HP, meg whitman

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Dave Kerpen is the CEO of Likeable, a social media agency that has worked with more than 200 leading brands including 1-800Flowers.com, Verizon and Neutrogena. He is author of the New York Times best seller Likeable Social Media.

Brands are beginning to establish best practices communicating with their customers and prospects on Facebook and Twitter. But many companies large and small have yet to fully leverage the social network for professionals, LinkedIn. With over 120 million user accounts, LinkedIn has also become an essential social network for companies, especially those in B2B, to leverage in their communication plans. Success on LinkedIn isn't just about individual efforts, it's about team efforts.

Below, find seven companies large and small that have found success on LinkedIn. We’ve included some takeaways on what they do right and how you can emulate their success.

1. IBM

IBM has over 450,000 followers on LinkedIn, making the IT giant the most followed company on the network. The company page features recent blog posts and tweets, an intro video, and stock prices. Most important, though, IBM features over 300 job postings and dozens of recommendations, driving onlookers to learn more about particular jobs and departments of interest.

Lessons: Showcase your company using available customization options. Post available jobs in the LinkedIn company profile page, where millions of people who are thinking about a job change look every day.

2. Hewlett-Packard

Hewlett-Packard has over 350,000 followers on LinkedIn. But more impressive is its "Products & Services" tab, which features over 3,000 recommendations for 19 unique products and services. Recommendations which surface to users first are those from your own connections, a powerful word-of-mouth endorsement.

Lesson: Feature your products and services on your company's LinkedIn page, and solicit recommendations from happy customers.

3. Dell

Dell's page features a "Product and Service Spotlight" application and a direct link to "Shop Now." With the growing trend of social commerce, Dell is leading the way on LinkedIn towards monetization of their company's investment in social media.

Lesson: Make it as easy as possible for people who stumble upon your company's LinkedIn profile to quickly find, express interest in, and purchase the products and services you offer.

4. Civic Ventures

Civic Ventures, a non-profit think tank on boomers, work and social purpose, uses a LinkedIn group to showcase its organization. The group, entitled "Encore Careers," gives 50+ year-old adults a place to discuss issues of concern to them in a safe and spam-free environment. The tiny non-profit has managed to attract over 1,200 people to the group in a short period of time. Stephen Anfield, the group's community manager, says that "With our demographic, LinkedIn is definitely the most widely used platform (beating out Facebook and Twitter), so it's important that I know how to best use this service."

Lesson: Use LinkedIn groups to create a community for your customers and prospects to congregate. If your ideal prospects fall into the same target audience, they'll have a lot to talk about. And with your organization leading the way, some of them will turn to you with their business.

5. New Home Star

New Home Star is a B2B company serving as a sales resource for home builders. Founder and President David Rice has his entire management team actively using their LinkedIn individual profiles to prospect and begin introductions. Says Rice, whose business has grown to a dozen markets in just three years, "LinkedIn has been the single most important tool in our business development efforts.

Lesson: LinkedIn isn't just about your brand page or groups you create, it's about your employees -- especially those in sales, marketing and management -- and their ability to use their own profiles to network, prospect, and build relationships.

6. The Income Tax School

Chuck McCabe, the CEO of small business The Income Tax School, supports independent tax businesses nationwide with tax preparer training and tax practice management products. He started a group on LinkedIn called Tax Business Owners of America. Says McCabe, "This group has helped to position me as an expert in the tax industry and highlight my education business. TBOA has proven to be more valuable than my blog." McCabe also answers people's questions about tax education using LinkedIn's answers product.

Lesson: Use LinkedIn Groups and Answers to showcase your expertise in your niche area. You don't have to sell -- just become the go-to expert, and your customers will come to you.

7. Voices.com

Voices.com uses all of Linkedin's features -- a robust company profile for recruitment and to showcase the brand, a group to create community for its customers, and many active individual profiles. Says CEO David Ciccarelli, himself an active user of LinkedIn, "Voices.com staff are all encouraged to create and maintain LinkedIn profiles. Articles written on company blogs are often shared by employees."

Lesson: Marketing success on LinkedIn is the result of a team effort. Utilize company pages, groups, and individual profiles to achieve the most success.

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These seven companies all demonstrate worthwhile lessons in LinkedIn marketing, recruitment and engagement. What are your favorite organizations doing on LinkedIn? And what other lessons have you learned? Let us know in the comments below.

More About: brands, Business, companies, features, linkedin, Social Media

Facebook officially announced its new music initiative at its f8 developer conference on Thursday.

As part of its new Open Graph app platform, Facebook has partnered with a host of music companies to bring real-time music streaming and discovery to the timeline.

Launch partners include Spotify, Rhapsody, MOG, Rdio, Soundcloud, Earbits, Vevo, Slacker Radio and Songza.

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Spotify

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Spotify’s CEO Daniel Ek was on-stage at f8 and he shared some interesting statistics about Spotify users that have connected with their Facebook account.

According to Ek, Spotify users that connect with Facebook listen to more music, as well as a wider variety of music. They are also twice as likely to pay for music.

Elk also talked about the potential of music discovery using Facebook as a catalyst for finding new jams, sharing playlists with friends and seeing what your friends are listening to.

The company put together this video to showcase its new Facebook app.

Play buttons will start showing up around the Facebook newsfeed. Clicking on those buttons will start playing tunes via Spotify in what appears to be a seamless and connected way.

Spotify isn’t the only service that is getting the real-time music treatment, the other major music subscription services are launch partners too.

Still, Spotify is a particularly nice draw not only because it is free, but because it is available worldwide.

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Will Facebook Finally “Get” Music?

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Mashable has long lamented Facebook’s lack of a robust music platform. The big question is will the Open Graph apps finally give bands, labels and music fans a way to really socialize the music experience?

It’s shrewd — and smart — for Facebook to bring on music partners, rather than try building its own music service. This means that instead than focusing on licensing, the company can do what it does best: connect users with their friends.

We look forward to using Spotify, MOG and I Heart Radio with Facebook. Are you excited about the new music apps?

Spotify Hearts Facebook

Spotified Facebook Profile

Spotify in the News Feed

Shiny Happy People Laughin

Spotify Dashboard

Spotify in a Real Feed

Spotify in a Band's Fan Page

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More F8 Coverage:

---

• Prepare Yourselves: Facebook To Be Profoundly Changed
• Facebook Now Has 800 Million Users
• Facebook Timeline: Here's What It Looks Like [VIDEO]
• Facebook Open Graph Seeks to Deliver Real-Time Serendipity
• Yahoo Hooks Up With Facebook for Socially Curated News
• Facebook Adds TV & Movies to the Stream
• What Do You Think of the Facebook Changes? [OPEN THREAD]
• Facebook Reveals Major Updates at F8 [LIVE BLOG]
• Facebook Timeline Redefines User Profiles
• Spotify Comes to Facebook [PICS]

More About: f8, MOG, music subscription services, rdio, spotify

For more Entertainment coverage:

• Follow Mashable Entertainment on Twitter
• Become a Fan on Facebook
• Subscribe to the Entertainment channel
• Download our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad

Mark Zuckerberg has announced big Facebook changes — now it’s your turn to react. What do you think of the new Timeline, showing all your stories and all your apps? Is it really a new way to express who you are?

How do you like the Open Graph innovations? How about the new integration of music, movie, TV and news apps?

SEE ALSO: Facebook Adds TV & Movies to the Stream

Are there particular questions you have for Zuckerberg? What do you think our reporters at f8, Ben Parr and Jennifer Van Grove, should ask Zuck?

Let us know in the comments, and vote in our poll:

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Here’s a look at the new Timeline, and you can view images from the event below.

Andy Samberg and Mark Zuckerberg

Beast's Facebook Page

Ben Parr and Jennifer Van Grove

F8 programing team

Zuck Dog

Beast

Before f8 Keynote

"I'm not really friends with these people"

Andy Samberg

Andy Samberg

Timeline Mobile

Mark's Timeline

Mark Zuckerberg

A View of Timeline from the Audience

Courtesy of Robyn Peterson

Mark with Timeline

Zuckerberg's Cover

Timeline

Timeline

Timeline

"Any Verb, Any Noun"

Reed Hastings

Reed Hastings

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek

Watch Netflix and Hulu from Facebook

Nike+

Mark Zuckerberg and Words With Friends

Washington Post Social Reader

Running and Eating

Brett Taylor

Brett Taylor

Chris Cox

Chris Cox

Facebook Memories

Mark Zuckerberg Closes F8

Mark Zuckerberg Closes F8

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More F8 Coverage:

---

• Prepare Yourselves: Facebook To Be Profoundly Changed
• Facebook Now Has 800 Million Users
• Facebook Timeline: Here's What It Looks Like [VIDEO]
• Facebook Open Graph Seeks to Deliver Real-Time Serendipity
• Yahoo Hooks Up With Facebook for Socially Curated News
• Facebook Adds TV & Movies to the Stream
• What Do You Think of the Facebook Changes? [OPEN THREAD]
• Facebook Reveals Major Updates at F8 [LIVE BLOG]
• Facebook Timeline Redefines User Profiles
• Spotify Comes to Facebook [PICS]

More About: f8, Facebook, new features, open thread

Facebook has partnered with more than a dozen entertainment brands including Netflix and Hulu to add television and movie-watching to the Facebook experience, beginning Thursday.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg made the announcement at the f8 conference with a little help from Netflix CEO Reed Hastings.

Zuckerberg demonstrated the new on-site viewing possibilities with the Hulu canvas application. He also highlighted how the Facebook ticker will show off the real-time watching activities of a user’s Facebook friends, and theoretically draw people into watching and consuming more TV and movie content on Facebook.

Your Facebook Timeline will summarize your watching activities and put top movies and episodes on display for friends to see.

The Netflix Facebook application will work work in 44 of the 45 countries where Netflix is available, Hastings said during his time on the stage. U.S. Facebook users, due to legal constraints that are currently under review, will not have access to the application at launch.

Facebook’s movie and TV partners — others include IMDb, Flixster, DirecTV and Miso — add to its music and publisher partners to create a social network experience where its 800 million users can listen to music with each other, watch entertainment and read the news. All of these experiences are powered by Facebook’s new Open Graph.

Leading up to f8, Facebook also rolled out a number of updates including enhanced Friend Lists, a Subscribe button and a real-time ticker. It even altered the appearance and function of the News Feed.

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You can view more images from f8 below:

Andy Samberg and Mark Zuckerberg

Beast's Facebook Page

Ben Parr and Jennifer Van Grove

F8 programing team

Zuck Dog

Beast

Before f8 Keynote

"I'm not really friends with these people"

Andy Samberg

Andy Samberg

Timeline Mobile

Mark's Timeline

Mark Zuckerberg

A View of Timeline from the Audience

Courtesy of Robyn Peterson

Mark with Timeline

Zuckerberg's Cover

Timeline

Timeline

Timeline

"Any Verb, Any Noun"

Reed Hastings

Reed Hastings

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek

Watch Netflix and Hulu from Facebook

Nike+

Mark Zuckerberg and Words With Friends

Washington Post Social Reader

Running and Eating

Brett Taylor

Brett Taylor

Chris Cox

Chris Cox

Facebook Memories

Mark Zuckerberg Closes F8

Mark Zuckerberg Closes F8

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More F8 Coverage:

---

• Prepare Yourselves: Facebook To Be Profoundly Changed
• Facebook Now Has 800 Million Users
• Facebook Timeline: Here's What It Looks Like [VIDEO]
• Facebook Open Graph Seeks to Deliver Real-Time Serendipity
• Yahoo Hooks Up With Facebook for Socially Curated News
• Facebook Adds TV & Movies to the Stream
• What Do You Think of the Facebook Changes? [OPEN THREAD]
• Facebook Reveals Major Updates at F8 [LIVE BLOG]
• Facebook Timeline Redefines User Profiles
• Spotify Comes to Facebook [PICS]

More About: Facebook

Hulu now has more than 1 million paying subscribers. The subscription streaming service, which is currently for sale, hit the mark at the end of the summer.

Hulu CEO Jason Kilar had previously predicted that the service would hit the milestone by the end of 2011. Three months ahead of schedule and with Netflix losing customers, it is looking like Hulu Plus will continue to convert its 40 million-plus free users into paying subscribers.

According to Reuters, Kilar plans to invest $375 million in content in 2011. The major subscription streaming companies — Amazon, Netflix and Hulu — are all in a race to sign as many content deals as possible in order to lure in and retain subscribers.

Like Netflix, Hulu Plus is available on the iPhone, iPad, select Android phones and a variety of set-top boxes, Blu-ray players and connected TVs. Its content library includes both current programming and catalog titles. Unlike Netflix, Hulu provides users access to many programs the day after they air on broadcast or cable TV.

The company also launched its service in Japan earlier this month.

[via VentureBeat]

More About: hulu, hulu plus, netflix, subscription streaming

For more Entertainment coverage:

• Follow Mashable Entertainment on Twitter
• Become a Fan on Facebook
• Subscribe to the Entertainment channel
• Download our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad

Dish Network is set to announce a Blockbuster-branded all-you-can-watch streaming service on Friday designed to compete with Netflix, according to a report.

CNNMoney reports that Dish is holding a press event Friday entitled “A Stream Come True,” which appears to be the introduction of a Netflix competitor. Blockbuster’s current streaming service offers pay-per-view movies. A true rival to Netflix would offer unlimited viewing for a flat monthly fee.

This report comes as Netflix grapples with a host of troubles, many self-inflicted. The company angered its customers in July when it announced a price increase, then lost a content deal with Starz, and just this week introduced a questionable plan to split its DVD delivery and streaming services into two differently named units.

A Blockbuster streaming service, meanwhile, would not only compete with Netflix, but with Amazon and Hulu — a company that Dish is reportedly interested in buying.

Reps from Dish Network could not be reached for comment on the streaming service rumors.

Image courtesy of Flickr, trebomb

For more Entertainment coverage:

• Follow Mashable Entertainment on Twitter
• Become a Fan on Facebook
• Subscribe to the Entertainment channel
• Download our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad

Yahoo is betting the farm on Facebook with the launch of a completely new and social way to consume news.

The new Yahoo News feature, whose release coincides with the launch of the new Facebook Open Graph, is an attempt to infuse social into the news curation and discovery process.

“Yahoo has always had amazing content and amazing editorial ability,” Yahoo Director of Product Management Jonathan Katzman says. “Now users can discover the content through their friends.”

Once a user opts into the service (via the new Facebook permissions screen), she will be able to see what news stories her friends have read on both Facebook and Yahoo News. This simple two-way stream of information makes it possible to discover news content through your friends.

The crux of the Yahoo News-Facebook integration is the “facebar,” a row of your friends’ faces that appear above any article you read. Clicking on any of these faces will bring up their recent activity. There is also now a “You on Yahoo News” widget that sits to the right of the content. This widget lets you see a history of what you’ve read and gives you options for removing different stories from your Yahoo News feed and turning the social features off altogether.

This is only the beginning for Yahoo, though. The digital media company is also integrating Facebook with IntoNow, a mobile app that “listens to” and tags TV shows (the company acquired IntoNow earlier this year). “What we’re trying to have happen, and Facebook is trying to do as well, is to be the river of information flowing around your activity,” Katzman says.

Other Yahoo products will roll out with Facebook integration in the next few months, thanks to the additions the social network has made to the Open Graph. Yahoo believes that Facebook integration is good for business as well — it will lead to higher engagement, the struggling Internet giant argues.

The new Facebook integration in Yahoo News is simple, but it’s just the beginning for what the the company has planned. Facebook is about to become a whole lot more prominent on Yahoo.

You on Yahoo News

The "You on Yahoo News" widget lets you see and control your social activity on Yahoo News.

Your Activity

You can check your news reading history with the You on Yahoo News widget.

You've Read Content!

A prompt warning you that content you've read has been added to your feed.

Privacy

You can turn the social features on or off at any time

"Facebar"

The killer feature of Yahoo's Facebook integration is the "facebar," which shows what your friends have been reading just by clicking their profile photos.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, macida

---

More F8 Coverage:

---

• Prepare Yourselves: Facebook To Be Profoundly Changed
• Facebook Now Has 800 Million Users
• Facebook Timeline: Here's What It Looks Like [VIDEO]
• Facebook Open Graph Seeks to Deliver Real-Time Serendipity
• Yahoo Hooks Up With Facebook for Socially Curated News
• Facebook Adds TV & Movies to the Stream
• What Do You Think of the Facebook Changes? [OPEN THREAD]
• Facebook Reveals Major Updates at F8 [LIVE BLOG]
• Facebook Timeline Redefines User Profiles
• Spotify Comes to Facebook [PICS]

More About: Facebook, social news, Yahoo, yahoo news

The Mobile App Trends Series is supported by Sourcebits, a leading product developer for mobile platforms. Sourcebits offers design and development services for iOS, Android, Mobile and Web platforms. Follow Sourcebits on Twitter for recent news and updates.

You’re done. After months of slaving away over Xcode or Eclipse, you have finally finished your mobile app and submitted it to the App Store or Android Market. Within minutes of releasing the app, you see reviewers complaining about a bug or requesting a new feature. Whoops.

Figuring out how and when to update a mobile app is a crucial part of the mobile app development process. Mobile apps are very different from traditional desktop software apps. Let’s look at some of the most common reasons to update an app and how to handle the inevitable “upgrade” question.

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Update Stages

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When it comes to software versioning, or assigning a version number to a certain piece of software as it exists in a unique state, the most common number scheme is to assign a major version number, like 1, followed by a point release for minor updates, and sometimes followed by a second-point release for a revision or bug fix.

In the software world, version numbers typically follow a major.minor.revision pattern. For example, the current version of Twitter for iPhone is 3.3.6. The “3″ indicates that it is the third major release. The second “3″ indicates that it is the third minor revision of that release and the “6″ indicates that it is the sixth revision, or bug fix, to that minor release.

These numbers indicate what type of update an app has received.

The Bug Fix

The most frequent types of app updates are bug fixes. Bug fixes are typically covered in “revision” or “bug fix” releases. Bug fixes don’t change the structure or feature set of an app. Instead, these updates make sure that the app is working as designed.

No matter how much beta or user testing a developer does before releasing an app, there are always going to be problems, bugs and issues that only show up after the app is used more broadly.

Bug fixes are a way to keep the integrity and structure of the app intact, while making sure that it doesn’t crash and performs more optimally.

Google‘s update policy with the Android Market allows developers to push out updates whenever they want. With Amazon, Apple and Microsoft, however, updates have to go through the same approval process as submitting an app to an app repository in the first place.

Apple has a policy in place with the App Store that allows developers to fast-track an important or crucial bug or security fix without having to wait as long as with a regular update. Still, these instances are reserved for situations in which an app is either crashing consistently or is potentially insecure.

Because it takes time for even bug fixes to get approved, many developers try to lump several updates and bug fixes together in one release. This limits the number of new downloads for the user and prevents the developer from having to wait through multiple approval queues.

Developers should triage bug fixes based on factors like how many users are affected (or how many have complained) and the severity of a problem.

Adding or Removing Features and Updating UI

Adding or removing features from an app is a more significant update than a bug fix. For example, when Facebook released version 3.5 of its iPhone app, it rolled in new privacy updates, refined the user interface and added the ability to share external links from within the app.

It’s common for developers to use designations like “.5″ as a major milestone for a release. In other words, a 3.5 update is often seen as more significant than the 3.1 update.

Adding and removing features is an important part of the app development process. When it comes time to add a feature, it’s important to look at the feedback you are getting from your users. If enough users are requesting a feature, it’s a good idea to look into what would be required to add that feature.

Just as important as adding features is removing functionality. It isn’t uncommon for developers to go into the app creation process with one feature in mind, only to find that users don’t like or use the feature, or that it doesn’t work as expected.

Sometimes, features have to be removed for performance, stability or even compliance reasons. When making the decision to remove a feature, keep in mind what impact removing that feature will have on your users. If a feature is causing undue strain, performance problems or it’s not being used, dropping it is often worthwhile.

Marco Arment’s popular Instapaper app for iPhone and iPad has undergone some significant changes over the years. Arment is not afraid to remove features that aren’t used by enough of his users or that cause undue server strain.

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Major Updates

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A major version number update indicates that the app has some significant changes to its features, UI or both. This is the big release for an application.

Earlier this week, Instagram released version 2.0 of its popular iPhone app. The new version added a significant number of new features, including live filters, tilt-shift in camera, higher resolution photos and enhanced filter options.

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Major Update or a Whole New App?

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The big question for lots of mobile developers is when to issue a major update — as in a new version number — and when to release a whole new app.

With traditional software, developers can charge for software and offer special upgrade pricing. For example, when I bought Adobe Creative Suite CS5.5, I was able to get a discount directly from Adobe because I owned an earlier version of Creative Suite.

Likewise, when my favorite lightweight image editor Acorn was updated to version 3.0, its developer was able to offer it as a whole new version and charge for it accordingly.

This isn’t the case with most mobile app stores. Apple doesn’t allow developers to offer upgrade app pricing. In other words, if I want to update my iPhone app to version 2.0, I have to either give everyone who purchased 1.0 or higher a free upgrade or release a brand new version of the app.

Both strategies have their pros and cons, and it’s important for developers who charge for their mobile apps to take both scenarios into account.

Pros and Cons of Releasing an App Update

• Pro: Existing users will be happy that they don’t have to pay.
• Pro: Promoting the app and the update won’t require changing any links to the App Store.
• Con: The development costs for the new version need to come from brand new customers.
• Con: Users are forced to update the app (unless they explicitly choose not to).

Pros and Cons of Releasing a New App

• Pro: The developer can get paid for their work.
• Pro: Users are not forced to upgrade the app. They can continue to use the old version indefinitely.
• Con: Users might revolt or be disinterested in buying a new version.
• Con: Migrating settings might be difficult or untenable.
• Con: Promoting the app and letting new users know about the upgrade might be difficult.

Most mobile app developers do not release a new version of their app and instead update the existing version. However, some developers have managed to release a new version of the app and have done so successfully. Before selling to Twitter, Loren Brichter released Tweetie 2 for iPhone as a brand new app, and thus a paid upgrade. Some users did complain about the charge, but Brichter held his ground and the app was a massive success.

A common workaround that many developers have successfully used is to offer their app for free for a limited time, in order to allow existing users to upgrade for free, and then to start charging the usual sales price. Some developers also offer the app at a discount for the first few days both to promote a new release and as a gesture of good-will towards existing users.

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In-App Purchase as an Update Tool

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For developers of games and other types of extensible apps, a common upgrade approach is to release new level packs via in-app purchase.

PlayFirst, Inc’s Dash series of games frequently releases updates both to the main application, as well as additional level add-on packs. This is an easy way for the developer to extend the game without forcing customers to buy and download a new version.

Likewise, music apps and document and utility managers can offer add-ons that add support for new features.

Keep in mind, the in-app purchase approach doesn’t work with all apps. It’s a very different type of business model, but for game developers, can often be the best way to approach extending a game.

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Your Thoughts

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When do you update your apps? Are you in favor of releasing free major updates or releasing a brand new version of an app. Let us know.

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Series Supported by Sourcebits

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The Mobile App Trends Series is sponsored by Sourcebits, a leading developer of applications and games for all major mobile platforms. Sourcebits has engineered over 200 apps to date, with plenty more to come. Sourcebits offers design and development services for iPhone, Android and more. Please feel free to get in touch with us to find out how we can help your app stand apart in a crowded marketplace. Follow Sourcebits on Twitter and Facebook for recent news and updates.

More About: features, mashable, Mobile App Trends Series, mobile apps

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has just unveiled the new Facebook Open Graph and Facebook Gestures.

At the f8 conference in San Francisco, Zuckerberg unveiled the company’s plan to extend connections and sharing to the next level. As we reported earlier, Facebook felt constrained by the Like button because it was an implicit endorsement of content. Facebook wants users to share everything they are doing, whether it’s watching a show or hiking a trail, so it decided to create a way to “express lightweight activity.”

“Today we’re making it possible to create a whole new class of apps and change industries at the same time,” Zuckerberg stated.

To that end, Facebook is launching a new Open Graph for developers to build apps that allow users to share whatever they are doing without overwhelming their friends. It has three key components:

- Apps no longer have to ask for permission to post content to Facebook over and over again. Instead, a new Facebook permissions screen explains exactly what type of stories will be shared the first time you give an app permission to post to your Facebook. Once completed, it will no longer have to ask for permission

- Updates through the new Open Graph appear in the ticker automatically, but do not appear in the News Feed unless it’s an important event. This makes it easy to discover new content from your friends in real time.

- Users can share experiences, such as listening to music, through the new Facebok Open Graph and the ticker.

Facebook divided the types of apps that will be built on its platform into four buckets: Communication, Games, Media and Lifestyle.

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F8 2011

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Andy Samberg and Mark Zuckerberg

Beast's Facebook Page

Ben Parr and Jennifer Van Grove

F8 programing team

Zuck Dog

Beast

Before f8 Keynote

"I'm not really friends with these people"

Andy Samberg

Andy Samberg

Timeline Mobile

Mark's Timeline

Mark Zuckerberg

A View of Timeline from the Audience

Courtesy of Robyn Peterson

Mark with Timeline

Zuckerberg's Cover

Timeline

Timeline

Timeline

"Any Verb, Any Noun"

Reed Hastings

Reed Hastings

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek

Watch Netflix and Hulu from Facebook

Nike+

Mark Zuckerberg and Words With Friends

Washington Post Social Reader

Running and Eating

Brett Taylor

Brett Taylor

Chris Cox

Chris Cox

Facebook Memories

Mark Zuckerberg Closes F8

Mark Zuckerberg Closes F8

---

More F8 Coverage:

---

• Prepare Yourselves: Facebook To Be Profoundly Changed
• Facebook Now Has 800 Million Users
• Facebook Timeline: Here's What It Looks Like [VIDEO]
• Facebook Open Graph Seeks to Deliver Real-Time Serendipity
• Yahoo Hooks Up With Facebook for Socially Curated News
• Facebook Adds TV & Movies to the Stream
• What Do You Think of the Facebook Changes? [OPEN THREAD]
• Facebook Reveals Major Updates at F8 [LIVE BLOG]
• Facebook Timeline Redefines User Profiles
• Spotify Comes to Facebook [PICS]

More About: Facebook, Facebook Gestures, facebook open graph, Open Graph

Facebook has unveiled Timeline, a major re-imagining of user profiles that allows users to build what’s essentially a visual scrapbook of everything they’ve done on the site.

CEO Mark Zuckeberg showed off the new features in his keynote at the company’s f8 conference. It algorithmically organizes everything you’ve done on Facebook — from post photos to change relationship status to check in — and also allows users to fill out a “Way Back” section to add details that are omitted or pre-date the social network.

Facebook expects to roll out Timeline in a few weeks, but you can see what it looks like in the video above. We’re also tracking Facebook’s announcements on our live blog, and you can see what’s already been revealed in the gallery below:

Andy Samberg and Mark Zuckerberg

Beast's Facebook Page

Ben Parr and Jennifer Van Grove

F8 programing team

Zuck Dog

Beast

Before f8 Keynote

"I'm not really friends with these people"

Andy Samberg

Andy Samberg

Timeline Mobile

Mark's Timeline

Mark Zuckerberg

A View of Timeline from the Audience

Courtesy of Robyn Peterson

Mark with Timeline

Zuckerberg's Cover

Timeline

Timeline

Timeline

"Any Verb, Any Noun"

Reed Hastings

Reed Hastings

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek

Watch Netflix and Hulu from Facebook

Nike+

Mark Zuckerberg and Words With Friends

Washington Post Social Reader

Running and Eating

Brett Taylor

Brett Taylor

Chris Cox

Chris Cox

Facebook Memories

Mark Zuckerberg Closes F8

Mark Zuckerberg Closes F8

---

More F8 Coverage:

---

• Prepare Yourselves: Facebook To Be Profoundly Changed
• Facebook Now Has 800 Million Users
• Facebook Timeline: Here's What It Looks Like [VIDEO]
• Facebook Open Graph Seeks to Deliver Real-Time Serendipity
• Yahoo Hooks Up With Facebook for Socially Curated News
• Facebook Adds TV & Movies to the Stream
• What Do You Think of the Facebook Changes? [OPEN THREAD]
• Facebook Reveals Major Updates at F8 [LIVE BLOG]
• Facebook Timeline Redefines User Profiles
• Spotify Comes to Facebook [PICS]

More About: Facebook

Color is about to be reborn as a Facebook app for Android and iPhone capable of transporting you around the world, through the lenses of fellow Facebookers.

In less than 30 minutes I went to the beaches of Maui, traveled to the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, looked out the window of the Aria hotel in Vegas and caught an inside glimpse at a startup’s expansive Palo Alto offices, all thanks to Color’s new app.

Color for Facebook, which makes its debut to a select number of early app testers Thursday, represents the much-maligned $41-million-backed startup Color’s second attempt at reinventing social discovery via mobile.

CEO and co-founder Bill Nguyen says Color has been entirely reengineered around Facebook, scrapping its own social network and betting the farm — as Zynga has done rather successfully — on Facebook.

“We really set up a bad scenario,” he says of Color’s original app that set the bar too high and left users with nothing to do more often than not. “We sat back and said, ‘What do we do?’” Nguyen explains. “We’re going to go back and go to the one company in the world that we didn’t understand at all and ask for their help. That’s what we did. We went to Facebook.”

Nguyen says he knew just 35 minutes after Color’s launch that the app was a bust. Two weeks later, he reached out to Facebook for help and his master plan to rebuild the entire application around Facebook was set into motion. The decision caused a major rift in the company and led to several high-profile departures. “I said, ‘No, I’m going to blow it up and rebuild it from scratch with Facebook,’” he told Mashable.

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Bringing Color’s Proximity Tech to Facebook

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Color for Facebook puts the best of Color’s proximity technology on top of Facebook’s key features — social graph, News Feed, photos, comments and “likes” — in a dynamic, visual mobile app designed to add a richer hue to Facebook users’ relationships and activities.

The app is structured into four photo-centric tabs: Feed, Timeline, Friends and Inbox. The Feed is your Facebook News Feed as seen through photos. The Timeline is your complete history on Facebook — every single photo you’ve ever taken. And the Friends tab provides a comprehensive photo history for your Facebook friends.

The proximity piece that Color pioneered months ago comes into play with each photo that you snap via the application. A Color for Facebook shot can instantly be added to a time and proximity-based photo album, with your Facebook relationships adding context to the experience — a key element lacking in the Color application of yore.

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How Color Can Change Facebook

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But Color is also potentially changing Facebook in a profound way. The startup is giving Facebook’s 750 million users a way to see what others see through the lenses of their mobile devices. The feature is called “Visit” and it’s a Facebook gesture, as introduced by the Open Graph, that teleports Facebook users anywhere in the world, so long as there’s a Facebook user with a mobile phone handy.

Say you’re browsing Color for Facebook and notice that your friend Shelly is visiting Greece. Sure, you can wait for her to post photos to Facebook, but wouldn’t it be infinitely cooler to see what she’s seeing right now? Color’s “Visit” feature makes it possible. Request to visit Shelly. Shelly gets a notification on her device. When she accepts, she’ll start to broadcast from her iPhone or Android camera, and you’ll get a live view of everything she’s seeing in Greece, as she sees it.

Visits, for the time being, are devoid of audio and don’t allow for recording. Color may change those things in the future, Nguyen says.

“The premise is that we’re going to turn every single phone in the world into a way for users to experience life,” Nguyen says.

Visits are broadcast to Facebook and accessible from the Facebook ticker, making the live stream accessible to Facebook friends or subscribers, depending on the user’s preferences. A Color user’s friends would also receive a push notification when he or she is broadcasting.

Plus, Color for Facebook users don’t have to wait to be nudged to broadcast; they can click the “Host” button should they wish to give their social network friends voyeuristic access to what they're seeing.

When Visit and Color for Facebook launch to the public, the startup will finally have an opportunity to prove its naysayers wrong. Though, even Nguyen admits that the company missed the mark completely on the first go-around.

Post

Visit

Host

Color for Facebook

More About: color, Color for Facebook, Facebook

For more Business coverage:

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• Subscribe to the Business channel
• Download our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad

Timeline

Courtesy of Robyn Peterson.

Timeline

Timeline

Timeline

Timeline

Timeline

Timeline

Timeline Mobile

Courtesy of Robyn Peterson.

Timeline

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has unveiled the company’s much anticipated overhaul of profile pages, transforming the user profile into a virtual scrapbook that digs all the way into your past.

At the company’s f8 developer conference in San Francisco, Zuckerberg laid out Facebook’s vision for the future of profiles. He described the history of the Facebook profile, starting with the original profile from 2006, when Facebook was still known as TheFacebook. He explained that through all of these iterations, Facebook profiles have been a good gauge of what you’re doing now, but they are not a good way to share what you or your friends have done in the past.

“We’re more than what we did recently,” Zuckerberg explained to the audience.

It was then that Zuckerberg unveiled Timeline, the revamped version of the Facebook Profile. It’s a way to show off who you are, what you do and where you’ve been. It’s a complete design overhaul that makes a visual history of everything you’ve ever done, all the way to when you were born.

SEE ALSO: Facebook Timeline: Here's What It Looks Like [VIDEO]

Facebook automatically adds photos, status updates and life events from your Facebook history to your timeline, but you can also add photos and content from you past to fill out the “Way Back” section. In his demo, Zuckerberg showed how to add a baby picture to the beginning of your timeline.

“It’s fun and easy to fill out your timeline,” Zuckerberg said.

The new profiles also include a map feature that lets you see where you’ve been, thanks to Facebook Places. It maps out your travel. You can even mark your place of birth. But perhaps the most striking feature is the cover photo, which displays a giant image at the top of the new profile page.

Timeline’s purpose is to resurface all the content you have created on Facebook. The problem is simple: once a status updates leaves your profile, you are unlikely to ever see it again. Zuckerberg and the Facebook team want to make Facebook a place to express who you are while discovering who your friends are at the same time.

You can check out more from Facebook’s f8 conference in the gallery we’ve included below:

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More Images from F8:

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Andy Samberg and Mark Zuckerberg

Beast's Facebook Page

Ben Parr and Jennifer Van Grove

F8 programing team

Zuck Dog

Beast

Before f8 Keynote

"I'm not really friends with these people"

Andy Samberg

Andy Samberg

Timeline Mobile

Mark's Timeline

Mark Zuckerberg

A View of Timeline from the Audience

Courtesy of Robyn Peterson

Mark with Timeline

Zuckerberg's Cover

Timeline

Timeline

Timeline

"Any Verb, Any Noun"

Reed Hastings

Reed Hastings

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek

Watch Netflix and Hulu from Facebook

Nike+

Mark Zuckerberg and Words With Friends

Washington Post Social Reader

Running and Eating

Brett Taylor

Brett Taylor

Chris Cox

Chris Cox

Facebook Memories

Mark Zuckerberg Closes F8

Mark Zuckerberg Closes F8

---

More F8 Coverage:

---

• Prepare Yourselves: Facebook To Be Profoundly Changed
• Facebook Now Has 800 Million Users
• Facebook Timeline: Here's What It Looks Like [VIDEO]
• Facebook Open Graph Seeks to Deliver Real-Time Serendipity
• Yahoo Hooks Up With Facebook for Socially Curated News
• Facebook Adds TV & Movies to the Stream
• What Do You Think of the Facebook Changes? [OPEN THREAD]
• Facebook Reveals Major Updates at F8 [LIVE BLOG]
• Facebook Timeline Redefines User Profiles
• Spotify Comes to Facebook [PICS]

More About: Facebook, facebook profiles

Facebook opened its F8 conference in unconventional fashion on Thursday, with Saturday Night Live actor Andy Samberg parodying Mark Zuckeberg on stage.

His parody did include on very real stat though: Facebook has passed 800 million users (which Facebook measures as users that have logged in during the past 30 days). That means Facebook has added about 50 million users since July. Zuckerberg took the stage a few minutes after Samberg and offered another stat, noting that Facebook had recently seen its first day in which half a billion people logged into the site.

Zuckerberg is expected to reveal a number of major features during today’s keynote, including media sharing and an overhauled user profile. You can follow the latest updates on our live blog. Earlier this week, the site revamped the News Feed, as you can see in the gallery below:

1. Top Stories

Facebook's new design highlights posts that you'll likely find important, and prioritizes them at the top of your feed when you log in. The top stories are designated by a blue tag in the upper left corner of the post. From what we can see, however, top stories don't regenerate much throughout the day -- especially if you keep Facebook open in your browser like your Twitter ticker.

2. New Posts

Above your top stories you'll find the option to expand more recent posts, much like Twitter's "47 new tweets" real-time notification bar.

3. Recent Stories

However, the new post notification bar doesn't refresh as often, but instead automatically expands new stories much like the older version.

4. Hide Posts

In the drop-down tab on the upper right of every post, you still have the option to hide posts (whether to delete the individual story or to hide that person's updates altogether). In the new version, you also have the option to mark a post as a top story, thus increasing the likelihood that that type of post or friend will appear in your Top Stories feed.

5. Ticker

The new ticker on the upper right of your homepage condenses real-time posts. Hover over any story to expand and view likes and comments.

6. Ticker / Chat

If you expand your chat sidebar (whether or not you're online), the ticker attaches to the top. That way, any page you navigate away from the home feed will still display real-time updates. Adjust chat/ticker proportions by hovering over the gray bar between chat and the ticker.

7. Album Layout

Last but not least, Facebook has made album design a bit more aesthetic. Albums that appear in your newsfeed stack three photos for a more creative viewing experience.

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More F8 Coverage:

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• Prepare Yourselves: Facebook To Be Profoundly Changed
• Facebook Now Has 800 Million Users
• Facebook Timeline: Here's What It Looks Like [VIDEO]
• Facebook Open Graph Seeks to Deliver Real-Time Serendipity
• Yahoo Hooks Up With Facebook for Socially Curated News
• Facebook Adds TV & Movies to the Stream
• What Do You Think of the Facebook Changes? [OPEN THREAD]
• Facebook Reveals Major Updates at F8 [LIVE BLOG]
• Facebook Timeline Redefines User Profiles
• Spotify Comes to Facebook [PICS]

More About: andy samberg, Facebook, mark zuckerberg