Facebook Wants To Take Over Twitter And Google Search

Facebook fate lies in modifying searches on its platform.

Mr. Tom Stocky is anxious to tell the world about the things people things. He wants to acknowledge the masses about the global trends and happenings. This seems like the agenda of Twitter Inc. however, this is not case. Mr. Stocky is an employee at Facebook Inc. who wants to deal with a problem that has caused the tech giant to struggle since a long time. Yes, you guessed it right; its searches.

According to an estimate almost 1.5 billion searches are governed on the social media platform, each day. However, in most cases, these searches are to find people. This is the type of search an individual might conduct when they meet a stranger at a bar. The previous year, the company enabled the users to make searches for all public posts on the platform- this spanned beyond the stuff posted by pages or friends. The function was developed under the leadership of Stocky which makes use of an algorithm that allow it to refine and rank thousands of post by the users.

Mr. Stocky stated, “What we really tried to do was make Facebook a place where you could tap into the global conversation of what was happening in the world.” this seems similar to the phrase stated by executives at Twitter since a fairly long time. However, he further explained the goal of the company by adding, "We really want to basically make Facebook the best place to find what people are saying about something right now."

A search tool which is productive on Facebook can change the fate of the social media platform. The masses will rush to modify their privacy settings once they deduce that their posts are visible by the masses. On the other hand, some might just start to roll out posts for the masses and garner the limelight. This is similar to the mechanism of Twitter which works in real time. This is not it, but Google might just be the next sufferer since it can sabotage its online ad business.

An analyst at Axiom Capital Management, Mr. Victor Anthony stated, if the search mechanism of Fcaebook gains traction, then Google is actually in hot water. He further added, "If they get it right and they're able to monetize against searches, it's extremely lucrative for Facebook—billions in revenue."

However, this is not as easy as it may seem since there is a lot that needs to be done before the tech giant can reach that point.

Back in 2004, search was the first thing which was featured on the social media platform when it was designed by Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Mark Zuckerberg during his educational stay at Harvard. The first few users could make a profile and search their friends to increase their network. Over the passage of time, the company has added various features to the search bar located at the top of the page but in most cases it has languished.

"When people actually associate Facebook with answering the questions they have, that's when we'll be successful,” explained Stocky.

Facebook Instagram Comes With A New Intriguing Feature

Now you can manage multiple accounts on Instagram.

Facebook Inc. owned Instagram, a photo sharing platform recently made an announcement through a blog post where they acknowledged the users regarding a new feature that is now live for its Android and iOS app users.

The mechanism is very simple where users are required to open the Instagram application from the device, and then browse to the profile setting where they will be required to press the option of adding an additional account. After that, you will be asked to type in your username and password so that the social media platform verifies your identity and the account is added to your mix.

As per the update, every Instagram user can run almost five accounts that can be logged in a go. So if you wish to switch amongst the multiple accounts, then just tap on the username surfacing on the top of the screen when you browse through your profile. A list will appear of your managed accounts and then you can choose the one you want.

All the Instagram accounts have been enabled with push notifications. Thus all those users who now have added more than one Instagram account to the application will thus get notified through all the accounts which have notifications set on enabled. It is quite similar to the situation where users deal with a singular Instagram account, thus the push notifications are dependent on the last login time of the users. All the notifications that have gathered after the last logon will be received once a user logs in.

However, if you wish to remove accounts, all you need to do is simply log out and the account will be removed from the list. The company has made it relatively easier for users to gauge which profile is actually active and which is not by making sure that the display picture of the signed in account is always prominently visible via the app.

Facebook which is the parent company of Instagram has been offering this feature to its user base since a fairly long time. The reason why the company has come up with a feature of this nature for Instagram is simple, by making it live, the social media giant wishes to attract advertisers and marketers who are running multiple accounts in one go. The company has enabled the marketers to switch amongst the accounts however, the company will not be responsible if the advertiser makes any blunder while switching. So, all the advertisers need to be extremely careful while switching from one account to another.

The company is on the right track when it comes to coming up with services and features that are likely to appeal the masses. The feature to switch accounts will be received positively amongst the users and will allow Page managers to explore the platform with ease. the photo sharing platform has gained significant momentum and this feature will further make it engaging and user friendly for all those running several accounts.

Twitter Ads Not Shown To Valuable Users

Special treatment is given to some prominent and valuable users of Twitter who are no longer bothered by advertisements.

Twitter supports favoritism on its platform when it comes to social advertising. Many of the ‘valuable’ users of the micro blogging platform admitted not seeing an ad on their accounts. Some users claim to have not seen a single ad while others say the amount has gone down very low in term of the advertisements they had seen.

Twitter Incorporation is now ad-free for special users. Many of them are prominent individuals including politicians and celebrities. The reason for this favoritism by the social media platform is to keep these high profile users entertained and stay on the platform rather than nagged by unnecessary advertisements.

The social media advertising company recently lost many of its senior executives, who are now joining other businesses in the industry. It even changed some of its policies and advertisements shown to the users. At the CES of this year, the company showed a new way of making and showing ads by gathering a collection of tweets from the platform, and branding them after attaining users’ permission, considering it a new and more realistic way of advertising.

The social media network, on the other hand, denied to admit not showing ads if users are high profile and has power but releases the amount of advertisements shown based on tweets they generate. People do not know yet as to what the truth is at this point, however many high profile users did report that they had not seen any ads in long time.

The VIP Twitter users’ feeds can be seen having tweets of followed users and nothing else. The company had been testing the ides of an ad free platform for the special users in September. It seems it is now implementing this idea, which came in to being when Jack Dorsey was made the CEO of the business he co-founded, once again.

Mr. Dorsey has been reportedly making changes and attempting to attract users to help the business to be successful since he has been re hired. Unluckily for him, that has not been going well so far.

The change of the way the micro blogging organization is showing ads now is a bit unusual because it damages the profit it generates, and it is known to generate a huge amount of money from ads. The business is trying to provide a better experience to high profile users so that they start using the platform more, which in return will attract their fans to the social media platform. The idea is a bit farfetched but is definitely not unachievable.

Twitter Will Soon Enter E Commerce Market

Twitter is all set to make its way in the e-commerce sector by launching 'buy' buttons on featured tweets and ads.

Twitter Inc. is miles behind Facebook in terms of users, revenues, and advertisers. The company is working to catch up or become better to be the market leader eventually. According to Market Watch, “Twitter Inc. is investing more resources in a visually-appealing e-commerce strategy it hopes will entice consumers to ditch the digital middleman and buy things directly off its platform.” 

Facebook has previously launched a few features that would give a touch of e-commerce business to its platform by adding buy, sell, and payments tool on groups and messenger. The microblogging social media network giant announced on Friday that it is testing product and a few collection pages that can be easily accessed from the main news feeds when a user scrolls his timeline. These collection or product pages will be live separately.

According to sources, all of the dedicated product pages will focus on a particular product, for instance a book, apparel, or a pair of sneakers. It will be listing highly sought details that will include price, product description, and more details from the retail website.

The company will also give an option to its users to buy a certain listed product right on Twitter. The micro blogging platform will also ‘host tweets from the general tweeting population as a source of user reviews.’

Market Watch reported, “The collection pages would be separate to that, gathering top products handpicked by celebrities and brands, and aligned in an almost Pinterest-like photo format. While the collection pages might not initially offer an option to buy like the product pages, Twitter said it will test increased functionality in the coming months.”

According to the website, it is believed that microblogging giant is preparing a product, which will be the combination of Amazon and Pinterest. The company is all set to create an immersive experience for online shoppers and give them a good online marketplace in the coming time. It is said that it is currently testing the buy button feature since September.

With the rising trend of e-commerce and online shopping, Facebook previously announced on many occasions that it would try to change its groups for people to do business there. Thus, it introduced buy and sell button on groups along with a recently launched payment feature on its messenger.

Now Twitter is said to be following the footsteps of Facebook and compete against it in this sector as well. The social giant should understand the level of struggle required to achieve this task.

Twitter To Use Heron For Production And Traffic Surges

Twitter will be employing Heron to replace Storm in order to improve manageability and productivity.

Twitter Inc. is the social media network giant that provides a micro blogging platform to its users. After posting poor results for the first quarter of the fiscal year, the company is currently focused on changing its strategies in order to get back in the business.

In order to increase manageability and production, it has decided to employ a relatively faster system, named as ‘Heron’. It is believed that the newly installed system will have the access to be fully compatible with the ‘Storm’, its previous system.

Twitter confirmed about its new system, ‘Heron’, in its official blog post, which stated, “the social networking platform processes a huge quantity of events each day. It is pertinent to note that analyzing all the events is cumbersome, and poses a massive challenge for the management”, reported BidnessETC.

Previously, the social network used Storm as its system that was required to do such analyses. This system was an open source that had a distributed stream computation. However, its only drawback was that it could not handle heavy traffic, as well as increasing number of accounts.

With time, the requirement of Twitter was increasing in terms of incremental traffic and users signing up daily on the platform. Consequently, a change was necessary in order to keep up with the growing pace of the market and employed Heron within its infrastructure to meet the growing demands of the social media network.

It is believed that Heron is an advanced system, which is installed on a platform that provides real time analytics details. It will also be compatible with API and the previous system as well.

The social network unveiled the new system at the SIGMOD 2015 event on Tuesday. The company stated about the qualities of recent system in its official blog post, “A real-time streaming system demands certain systemic qualities to analyze data at a large scale. Among other things, it needs to: process of billions of events per minute; have sub-second latency and predictable behavior at scale; in failure scenarios, have high data accuracy, resiliency under temporary traffic spikes and pipeline congestions; be easy to debug; and simple to deploy in a shared infrastructure.”

This recent development will prove to be quite beneficial for the company in order to keep up with the pace of its daily activities. It will help the organization to not only increase but also improve and bring betterment in its manageability and productivity. To be precise, Heron is miles ahead of Storm and is said to be 10 to 14 times stronger than the previous system.

Facebook Might Fall Down As Yahoo! Did

Social media networking platforms are on the rise in today's era. Either there is a new entry in the market or the existing ones over takes other companies. Facebook is one of the most used social media networking platform which is widely used all across the globe. However, Facebook has the same fame and platform which Yahoo! once had. Yahoo! was but it lost everything as it continued its journey in the modern era. At its prime, Yahoo! had a market capitalization of over $128 billion but it failed to sustain its market position and the company's market capitalization now is only $10 billion or below.

According to him, Facebook earns revenue the same way Yahoo! did. Their major chunk of revenues come from the advertising companies that bought TV and magazine ads. According to Business Insider, "They [advertisement companies] were paying inordinate sums to become Yahoo's official partners in various sectors, from greeting cards to pet stores to travel."

It is believed that Yahoo! as well as Facebook is spending money on such ads from investments made by venture capitalist. However, it was a matter of time when the craze for venture capital funding as it ended quite abruptly.

Maybe that is the reason why the CEO of Snapchat predicts that the future of Facebook might not be as good as everyone believes!

Also hackers have only one thing on their mind these days which is the vulnerability of Facebook's source code. This is an imminent threat to the integrity of the social media platform of the company. The engineers at Facebook, made a massive blunder by dumping data in Pastebin which contains information of Facebook's digital world. Previously as well the company had paved way for external sources to make its way to the source code of Facebook. 

It does not require much effort to make your way to the source code of the company as various bits and pieces of information regarding it are available on Pastebin. If these pieces of data are compiled in a more efficient manner then one can easily hack the company's source code. Not only can one find names, various commands but also valuable information is scattered haphazard manner on this platform. This information on its own does not pose a threat on this stage but in extreme cases this data can completely rupture the social media site. 

The company has established a very strong firewall system but if anybody succeeds to seep in Facebook's servers then the repercussions can be quite extreme. This also raises another question, as data is an extremely precious commodity then why Facebook has not sanitized it efficiently or does not have a strong authentication system. 

All this poses a threat on long term basis and Facebook needs to act before its too late.