Facebook Messenger an eCommerce Development Strategy

Following Facebook strategy it appears that it is about to announce new features particularly in its Facebook Messenger 

The development stage for an in-store mobile payment capability.

According to The Information, following a source code analysis of the iPhone Facebook Messenger app it can be seen and noted commands such as "pay in person" and "pay directly in Messenger when you pick up the item"  therefore it can be deduced that Facebook Messenger can have in-built the capability for in-store purchasing features. Nevertheless, Facebook was not yet responded to this new feature which is most likely in a development stage. 

Furthermore, it is already possible send money to a friend via Facebook Messenger, however the iOS app code implies that Facebook will most likely expand Facebook Messenger features and capabilities as a payment tool. This follows a similar pattern in the peer-to-peer payment feature was also predicted months ahead of official release with an analysis of the app's code, which Engadget reported.

This is despite what Mark Zuckerberg said, that Facebook was not planning to launch its own payment product. However,  Apple Pay was mentioned as a potential partner (transcript provided by Seeking Alpha is can be read below):

On payments, the basic strategy that we have is to make it especially in products like Messenger that where the business interaction maybe a bit more transactional, to take all the friction out of making the transactions that you need. So, we don’t view ourselves as a payments business, that’s not the type of company that we are. We’ll partner with everyone who does payment. We look at the stuff that Apple is doing with Apple Pay for example as a really neat innovation in the space that takes a lot of friction out of transactions as well. And our view is that the less friction, the better the user experience, the more people can easily interact with businesses that they care about. And ultimately for our business that will drive up the amount that businesses are willing to pay to advertise to send people into those interactions because they perform well. So it’s good for everyone but that’s how we think about that.

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Artificial Intelligent Facebook Personal Digital Assistant

Facebook Personal Digital Assistant on Messenger App via Artificial Intelligence 

The messenger app has moved another level in terms of capabilities for its users, following this new capability. As a result this new offering is a competing solution with the other IT giants such as Apple Siri, Google and Microsoft Cortana in the digital personal assistant arena.

The Facebook Messenger lead David Marcus stated:

We are beginning to test a new service called M. M is a personal digital assistant inside of Messenger that completes tasks and finds information on your behalf. It’s powered by artificial intelligence that’s trained and supervised by people.

The differentiating factor from other Artificial Intelligence services currently available as from the examples mentioned above is that the facebook service called M is able to complete tasks on a user behalf.  Furthermore, it can also purchase items, organize orders to be delivered to your friends locations, book restaurants, travel arrangements, appointments and much more.

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Facebook R&D Advances in Pattern Recognition for Computer Vision

Facebook latest R&D developments in computer vision and pattern recognition have produced impressive results with DeepFace. 

The produced facebook technology is now capable to recognize people's faces almost as accurate as an average human (with 97.5 percent accuracy). The recognition results shown provides great results although within short variety of scenes.

The Facebook researchers were capable of building 3D models from simply using faces from photos, it then follows that the 3D models can be used and rotated to improve accuracy and thus provide matching/recognition of similar features faces captured at different angles. 

The Facebook DeepFace algorithm as expected requires to be trained on an extensive pool of faces in order to achieve best and optimum accurate results but that is a common practice for any smart system. At present its capability consists of identifying up to 4,000 identities based on a database of over 4 million individual images.

The Facebook research team will present its findings at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference in Columbus, Ohio in June. 

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Backup Your Facebook Tagged Photos and Videos to the Cloud

Facebook users can now backup their photos and videos that they were tagged by their friends via the new feature from the service IDrive.

The way the new feature works is that as the on-line backup service traditionally has it users connecting their local PC drives it is now also possible to connect to facebook and enabling it users to back up photos and videos to its servers on the cloud as a service.

Furthermore, it is not just simply backing photos and videos it now also offers the capability to back up photos and videos where a user has been tagged by its friends. This tagging feature means that in many cases if a user friend that owns the photo or video decides in the future to untag or delete the photo or video, or even further if the friend no longer is a friend, the original photo or video is still included in a user IDrive backup.

The data from Facebook once backed up, it can be accessed from any web browser or via the iOS app.

There are other backup similar services such as OwnBackup and Backupify.

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New EU Data Protection Law Implies that Facebook Charges its Users

Popular services such as Facebook and Gmail among others, will be facing a huge challenge in terms of their business strategies on their users free membership current status, if the new EU data protection law is implemented. This is the view of some legal experts. The new law, enforces new restrictions on how companies process, store and manage personal data, the draft legislation can be seen on European Data Protection Regulation.

The new proposed law presents many difficulties for third party web services to present terms and conditions that force users to pass their consent and ownership automatically to the third party service to take advantage of a users data on their data processing mechanisms.

Eduardo Ustaran, at Field Fisher Waterhouse stated: services which use information gleaned from user data to generate ad revenue, would have to abandon their ad-supported models if the proposals became law unchanged. If they weren't able to use your data in the way that is profitable or useful for them for advertising purposes, then either the user has to pay for it or stop using the service.

Erika Mann, at Facebook, also stated: "We are concerned that some aspects of the report do not support a flourishing European digital single market and the reality of innovation on the internet - which is inescapably global in nature, and which includes important partners like the US. We will be examining these proposals closely in the coming weeks".

The time-scale for the implementation of the new law is that it should come into effect this year, then it will follow a period of around two years where European member states will implement at a local level.

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Facebook Launches Self-Destruct Interactive Poke Mobile App

Facebook now has a new app, named “Poke”, the main features of this new mobile app is that allows users to send photos, videos, pokes, or even text Facebook messages to existing Facebook friends. The main attractiveness of this mobile app is that the content shared, poked and notified with friends does expire shortly after a few seconds with settings duration predefined as options. This new app follows, since when it was first reported on AllThingsD around a few weeks ago.

Other existing mobile app such as Snapchat on iOS and Android is quite popular with young users, thus Facebook trying to attract this type of users with its own version. Currently around 50 million photos are shared on the competitor Snapchat mobile app on a daily basis, with a total of 1 billion so far. As a result, Facebook clearly noted as sees it as the next big thing that could perhaps disrupt their own mobile app service popularity in the future. Reports also indicate that Facebook did try to acquire the app, nevertheless the founders decided not to accept the offer, as a result Facebook has produced this competitive mobile app in a mere 12 days in order to compete and remain leader on the popularity ranking lists.

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Facebook Improves Security Moving Users to HTTPS, Slower Speed

Facebook is now improving security following an infrastructure upgrade and moving all its users to HTTPS, the transition period will start this week and it was announced that will “slow down connections only slightly.” Nevertheless, users will still be able to opt-out of HTTPS for maximum speed. Following this development to include all users as a standard setting, the context is where HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) was already available to all users, nevertheless most users did not change or selected their account settings to use this secure connection.

Following a Facebook Developer Blog post, the security manager Frederic Wolens stated:

“It is far from a simple task to build out this capability for the more than a billion people that use the site and retain the stability & speed we expect, but we are making progress daily towards this end. This may slow down connections only slightly, but we have deployed significant performance enhancements to our load balancing infrastructure to mitigate most of the impact of moving to HTTPS, and will be continuing this work as we deploy this feature.”

New Routes for Facebook as it Enters World of On-line Gambling

Facebook is innovating once again, following the disappointing stock share current value descent pattern, it seems that Facebook is now fighting back by trying to show shareholders that its value can only go up as new income possibilities are always emerging.  Facebook has launched its first very own  application for users to be able to gamble using real money.
Facebook users residents in the UK aged 18 and over, will be able to play online bingo and slots with cash prizes. Nonetheless, when it comes to world markets, it may not look so easy to offer this service to its users, as many Countries to have legal restrictions and regulations linked to on-line gambling activities for its citizens.

In this context, particularly in the US, the market for real-money social gaming is in effect closed. It has only been recently possible to play on-line however the restrictions are so tight that it becomes so difficult to implement a successful business plan including its required monitoring technology.

Facebook on-line gambling will start with the Bingo and Slots Friendzy app in partnership with Gamesys, which is a top player in the UK gambling operators. Furthermore, facebook seems to in talks with gambling companies to diversity the games to perhaps include casino games such as blackjack and roulette.

Facebook Stories, A New Social Site in Extraordinary Ways

Facebook has today launched an interesting original site where its content is run and maintained by Facebook itself, named Facebook Stories. The way the site operates is collecting and selecting  interesting stories depending on the chosen theme during on a monthly basis. The inaugural Facebook Story for this month, is based on the  theme of "remembering".  Anyone can view an infographic that details and presents a process on how Facebook users typically share and post important memories or events such as travel and marriages, it is also possible for users to submit stories, however Facebook will decide what story or who to feature.

The site will be showing and featuring videos and articles that will tell stories in a creative way, based on the activity of Facebook users and its community, nevertheless this new site does not resemble to Tumblr's Storyboard or Twitter Stories. In comparison this new site of Facebook Stories is quite different as it will enhance community stories based on a monthly trend or theme.

Facebook's Tucker Bounds commented on ABCNews "We wanted to create a place where we could celebrate great stories" . On this new site, will be displayed not just stories but also features such as Goodreads and Playlists to feature new music by "inspiring artists", furthermore there will be a monthly podcast.

Facebook Calls To Compete with Airtime and Google+ Hangouts

Following recent news, it appears that Facebook is now testing a new feature “Call” button  to be positioned at the top users profiles pages.  This is a recent new development following the video chat feature which was launched when Facebook partnered with Skype over a year ago.

This may interpreted as a strategy and a display of the competitive spirit of Mark Zuckerberg's following his own amazed photo posted on-line while testing Airtime's solution.  This new development does fall quite nicely in a competitive strategy in an attempt to outsmart Airtime, as well as a start to direct and address the growing popularity of Google+ hangouts.

Is Global Facebook Helping the World or Itself?

At present the financial model of Facebook relies on advertising revenue, as a result it can be argued that Facebook is better than other technology based companies, however other people also argue that in terms technological development the platform does not contribute to original scientific knowledge or discoveries, furthermore nor does it challenge sufficiently current technologists with new thinking and implementations.

Facebook as a business which has revenue solely based on advertising is highly dependent on external economic factors. In terms of global benefit it also does not contribute with any benefit to people in terms of their economic development, as most global companies tend to do.

Facebook Realisations

Facebook is highly reliable on selling people's content, networks and all associated glorifications of which businesses are happy to be part of in order to further their own interests of reaching many people globally.  As a result it can be argued that the present value of Facebook on the stock market is a mere reflection of how people see it in terms of their own contributions and efforts on their facebook activities.

The main value generated from facebook may be the time spent by its users and their activities, which in terms of data it is highly valuable but not necessarily worthy of technology innovation, rather popular activities on a mass scale.

Facebook’s populism is amazing for a few selected people which run and own facebook, however for the vast majority of people around the world including economic development does very little apart from very cheap entertainment and time consumption.

Future Prospects 

To be fair, Facebook does allow people to network online by helping connections across the globe, subsquently a few years ago most facebook users would find it difficult to communicate in a social manner with distant people or even with people near you at convenient times suited to everyone's time schedules. Furthermore, users can meet new connections and broaden their knowledge about world society as well as learning and understanding cultural differences.

As Facebook is now listed publicly, a new wave may happen in terms financial returns for its owners, however its traditional market is based on users which prefer not to pay for things, rather be entertained and challenged on pretty things online which make them look engaging, sharing, popular and  little celebrities. This could quite the sort of users that do not like or understand too much of the financial market and are dubious particularly on the current world concerns for financial stability.

News Feed Optimization on Facebook

The news feed on Facebook is quite important to gain good ratings by facebook .  Furthermore, the feed can be customized following  its network and its patterns of activity, including how your friends they interact statistically with your news feed.  The news feed on facebook presents users with the top posts from a particular user’s network, it is processed by filtering around 99% of content published by a user.  Below are a few techniques to better optimize your news feed posts on facebook:

Post a variety of content to attract interactions from a higher percentage of your users, raising your affinity (facebook’s algorithm, please note post below) score.

Presenting positive, interesting and fun content on Facebook.

Talk about Facebook.

Respond to comments that your fans post on your contentto increase the number of interactions per post.

Respond to comments that your fans post on your wall to increase your affinity score.

Experiment with targeting posts to get a higher feedback score.

Post regularly, but not too intensively so that your posts can be measured in due time.

Post content outside of main work hours – Facebook users interact more enthusiastically during out of office hours.

Include eye catching images on blog posts.

Appealing meta description for any links you post, it helps the algorithm and seo.

Use share links on your blog articles and landing pages to encourage users to post your content directly.

Integrate landing pages within Facebook, most users like to stay within Facebook.

Post videos directly instead of links to articles with videos, so users can watch the video within Facebook.

Include links in video descriptions to increase traffic to your website.

Share photos, use Flickr integrated with your Facebook account.

Post photos directly to Facebook.

Use simple language.

Ask questions and specifically ask for feedback from your fans.

Use Facebook Insights to measure which content performs the best on your specific page.

Promote user-generated content, including user-created photos, comments, or links.

EdgeRank Facebook’s Algorithm Explained
Facebook has shared their algorithm for ranking content on Facebook and filtering what appears in the news feed. The algorithm consists of three components:

1. Affinity – the number of times 2 people (or a person and a page) have interacted

2. Weight – the number of times users have interacted on your page.

3. Recency – the time since the content was posted