Yogi Land

Mark Zuckerberg

Zuck, who owns 503.6 million shares, is now worth $19.14 billion, though his personal fortune surpassed the $20 billion mark several times.

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OK, so Facebook’s IPO may have seemed like a lot of sound and fury for 23 cents, but there will still doubtlessly be some celebrating in Menlo Park Friday night.

That’s because a lot of Facebookers got fabulously rich on Friday. True, it probably would have been an even more festive occasion if the stock had hit the $54 that Twitter had predicted, but Facebook’s measly gain on its first day of trading was still worth $115.7 million to Mark Zuckerberg.

Here’s why Zuck and some other big Facebook investors still have cause to pop the Champagne.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, AUDINDesign

More About: bono, Facebook, facebook ipo, Greylock partners, mark zuckerberg, sean parker

How many articles have been written about Facebook in its eight-year history? Impossible to tell — by the time you came up with an estimate, no doubt, another dozen would have been added to the list.

It is, at least, easy to pinpoint the very first story written about the social network. It appeared in the Harvard Crimson on February 9, 2004, five days after Zuckerberg launched thefacebook.com from his dorm room. The headline says it all: “Hundreds Register for New Facebook Website.”

Nowadays, of course, hundreds of new users sign up for Facebook every minute. But in those first few days, 650 signups across the university was a huge deal — and Zuck wasn’t shy when it came to crowing to the Crimson:

“Everyone’s been talking a lot about a universal face book within Harvard,” Zuckerberg said. “I think it’s kind of silly that it would take the University a couple of years to get around to it. I can do it better than they can, and I can do it in a week.”

This is classic young Zuckerberg; the same cocky punk who handed out business cards that read “I’m CEO, bitch.” Still, there’s one very humbling detail further down the article:

Just as with the popular website Friendster, which Zuckerberg said was a model for his new website, members can search for people according to their interests and can create an online network of friends.

That’s it — no mention of the Winklevoss twins, whom as we all know had been hoping to build a similar Harvard-based site with Zuckerberg’s help just weeks previously. But a very clear pointer to the primacy of Friendster, the only widely-known social network at the time (save, perhaps, for the up-and-coming MySpace).

In 2004, Friendster was at the height of its powers, but also frustrating its users with slow load times, and on the edge of imploding. Some months after this article, it would begin a dizzying succession of CEOs that would hasten its decline (and eventual transformation into a Malaysia-based social gaming service).

If only someone had alerted Friendster’s founder (and then CEO) Jonathan Abrams to this genius coder at Harvard who had created an homage to his site, the future of social media might have turned out very differently.

Even then, however, it might have been too late. One week later, a second Harvard Crimson article on Zuckerberg revealed that the site had shot up to 4,300 users — or 55% of the student population. Facebook was well on its way.

Does the Facebook founder owe a debt of gratitude to Friendster? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

More About: Facebook, friendster, Harvard, mark zuckerberg

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Want to make tagging friends in Facebook photos a bit easier? New facial recognition app Klik launched out of beta on Thursday.

Simply download the iPhone app and get ready to snap of picture of your friends or family. Before you even click the button to take a pic, the app immediately recognizes your friends’ faces. After you take the pic, Klik will identify the face (if they’re on Facebook) and identify who that person is. If the app gets it wrong, you can find the right name from your Facebook contacts. Plus, Klik’s creators say the app gets smarter over time and should become increasingly better at identifying people in photos the more you use it.

To familiarize the app’s facial recognition technology with the faces you know, simply connect the app to Facebook. The facial recognition software will analyze each face in your photos and remember the name associated with each tag — although this could take up to one full day.

Once you’ve taken and tagged a photo, you can apply a variety of filter options. From there, you can post the photo to Facebook or Twitter. Klik also has a social component — users can view your friends’ photos and see the locations where those pics where taken.

Klik was developed by Face.com, a facial recognition software company. Currently,
Klik is available for free in the app store for iOS 4.3 or above.

What do you think about this app? Would you use Klik? Tell us in the comments.

More About: apps, Facebook, facial recognition

The media, forever a navel-gazing industry, worked itself into a fever earlier this week after evidence emerged that usage of Facebook’s social reader apps is declining.

In an article designed to further dramatize The Washington Post‘s recent tension between its editorial and financial divisions, Jeff Bercovici at Forbes pulled up a chart from AppData illustrating a falloff in the number of monthly average users of the Washington Post Social Reader app.

John Hermann at Buzzfeed quickly pointed out that usage of social reader apps was down for many news publications, not just The Washington Post.

Why the dropoff? Herrman blames the apps themselves, which he calls annoying. He writes:

“Social Readers always seemed a little too share-y, even for Facebook; they felt more like the kind of cold, descriptive, invisible and yet mandatory services we’re used to seeing from Google rather than genuinely new and useful tools for spreading information. And they feel, I don’t know, kind of broken right now? My brain already associates those little blocks of auto-fed stories with second-class content. I mean, I know my friends didn’t really mean to show to it to me. Why would I click? And god, why would I sign up for the thing that seems to have tricked its way into my timeline? It’s an app that broadcasts Internet illiteracy for everyone to see.”

I see his point — but Facebook doesn’t. A spokesperson tells me that although the number of people using social reader apps has fallen at some publications, engagement levels are up as the company introduces new tools and adjusts its algorithms to display more relevant content to users.

“We’re trying to get the right content in front of people, to up the signal to noise ratio,” the spokesperson explained.

The Facebook representative added that although some apps have seen “short-term traffic swings,” which is typical in the ongoing development of any online product, Facebook is committed to the long-term evolution of these apps “to create a good social news experience.”

User numbers are also up for The Huffington Post‘s, MTV’s and ESPN’s apps, the spokesperson noted.

Social reader apps were first introduced in September. Through the apps, which are built on Facebook’s Open Graph, publications like The Washington Post and The Guardian are able to serve users a mix of content based on the information they’ve shared with Facebook, including their interests, “likes” and stories that are trending among their friends. Those stories are displayed in the apps and make frequent appearances in the Newsfeed.

The numbers may be up for debate, but there was some surprising consensus among media critics — like Herrman, above — about the poor user experience offered by social reader apps. We’re curious: Do you use any of these apps? What do you like or dislike about them?

Front page thumbnail courtesy of iStockphoto, -Oxford-

More About: Facebook, Media, Social Reader

American Express went from virtually zero social media presence in 2009 to being hailed by Advertising Age as the “real winner” at South By Southwest this year.

How did AmEx do it? Leslie Berland, SVP of digital partnerships and development at the company, attempted to retrace the brand’s steps during a talk at Mashable Connect, and then dispensed a few social media tips on Friday.

Berland highlighted two major inflection points in AmEx’s social media marketing history: its introduction of Small Business Saturday and its promotion of Sync at SXSW. The former started with a “lofty goal,” which was to “start a movement,” Berland said.

Launched in 2010, Small Business Saturday was designed as a response of sorts to Black Friday, which comes the day before. The idea is to motivate consumers already in shopping mode to spend their cash at their local mom and pops. Berland says her aha moment with the program was realizing that it was a great fit on Facebook, where the SBS Page drew 1 million fans in three weeks. (It now has 2.8 million fans.)

That’s a respectable showing considering the brand only began focusing on social media in 2009, when it set up AmEx’s first Twitter account. Berland recalls that it took three weeks to come up with the account’s first tweet. No wonder she likens getting a large brand on social media to giving birth.

Berland’s coup de grace was this year’s SXSW promotion for AmEx Sync‘s Twitter tie-in, which appears to have captured the hearts and minds of much of the event’s attendees.

The effort, which introduced a program that offers cardmembers discounts for tweeting advertised hashtags, began before SXSWers even arrived. Berland secured 30 minutes of free Wi-Fi from GoGo to 80% to 90% of the flights to Austin, Texas, that included a plug for Sync. Then, once in Austin, AmEx offered 700 tickets to its Jay-Z concert. The concert became a major draw at the show, an outcome that reflects Jay-Z’s popularity as well as AmEx’s exacting standards as an entertainment partner. As Berland recalls, there was a long list of potential concert draws, but the brand was seeking someone who was both hip with the local crowd and popular nationally. (Justin Bieber was among those who didn’t make the cut.)

Though Berland’s talk included some trite advice (“Think like a startup”), she was more candid in her Q&A with the audience. When one attendee challenged her about her statement that “90% of our strategy is defined by the things we don’t do,” Berland said she meant, for instance, that it’s wise to resist the pressure to embrace all formats. “What I’m often challenged with often is a lot of ‘I want this, we want that’” she said, referring to internal pressure. However, “It’s not a ‘build it they will come,’ thing.”

Berland also said it doesn’t make sense to back a Facebook campaign with traditional media like print and TV ads. “If you’re running a program on Facebook, buy ads on Facebook.”

Swag Bag

The contents of each bag given to Mashable Connect attendees.

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Mashable Connect Sponsors

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The Adobe Digital Marketing Suite is an integrated set of applications which allow businesses to gather customer insight and optimize advertising, conversion and retention efforts as well as the creation and distribution of content. For example, using the Suite, marketers can identify the most effective marketing strategies and ad placements as well as create relevant, personalized and consistent customer experiences across digital marketing channels, such as onsite, display, e-mail, social, video and mobile. The Suite enables marketers to automatically adjust to customer interactions and better maximize marketing ROI, which leads to a positive impact the bottom line.

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More About: american express, Facebook, Marketing, mashable connect

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So maybe that $1 billion it cost Facebook to buy Instagram was a bargain after all.

The photo-sharing app is on fire. It now has more than 50 million users — and is adding new ones at the rate of roughly 5 million per week, according to its API.

Instagram hit 40 million users around April 13, and 30 million at the start of the month (no April Fooling). This is astonishing growth for an app that started 2012 with just 15 million users.

Of course, the fact that the app was recently released for Android — after being iPhone-only for its first two years — is likely driving a lot of those sign-ups. But Instagram also hit number one in the iOS App store for the first time in the wake of the Facebook acquisition.

Google doesn’t break out exactly how many Android downloads an app gets on its Google Play page. But Instagram did cross the 10 million download threshold two days ago, so it’s a safe bet that roughly 40 million of those users are on the iPhone.

In other words, iPhone and Android have divided Instagram sign-ups fairly equally since it became available for both platforms. (So much for Apple executive Phil Schiller’s claim that the app had “jumped the shark.”)

And who is Instagram user number 50 million? According to Gramfeed, it’s a user named fox289. All we know about the user is drawn from his or her profile picture: an FC Barcelona soccer shirt. Just how many accounts are like fox289 — with no photos posted, no users followed — is something Facebook will be very interested in.

Thanks to alert Mashable reader and web developer Rakshith Krishnappa for the tip. Where does Instagram go from here? How big can it get? Let us know in the comments.

25. Jason Mraz

Username: Jason_Mraz Followers: 363,621 Number of Pictures: 254

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More About: android, Facebook, instagram, iphone

As athletes get ready to take the global stage during the London 2012 Olympic Games less than 100 days away, Procter & Gamble has released a new ad praising mothers worldwide. Press play and cue the waterworks.

In three days, the video has received over 700,000+ views on YouTube. P&G, the personal care and cleaning products giant and Olympic partner, released the “Best Job” video in anticipation of the summer games.

The video, directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, features mothers on four continents in London, Rio de Janeiro, Los Angeles and Beijing. These inspirational women raising their young Olympians are the true champs.

SEE ALSO: Olympics Unveil Social Media Hub to Connect Athletes and Fans

The “Thank You, Mom” campaign is the largest in the company’s 174-year history, according to a P&G press release. It ties in social media and print elements.

On the official “Thank You, Mom” Facebook Page — with over 510,000 likes — the company connects its consumers with posts about its products, Olympics news and athlete updates. There’s also an app within the page where sons and daughters can thank the maternal figures in their lives with a video, pictures or a simple message.

Tell us in the comments if this video made you weep.

Thumbnail image courtesy of P&G

More About: Business, Facebook, Marketing, proctor & gamble, Social Media, social networking, Video

Creating mobile app for your brand can be quite the endeavor. A new product from mobile app builder Cabana attempts to help you cross that hurdle, by creating a mobile app using information from your Facebook fan page.

Called Fan Page Mobilizer, the Facebook app lets the owner of any Facebook fan page take that contact and reformat it into a mobile web app.

The web app pulls information from the fan page, and uses it to power the content you see in the mobile app for your brand.

Getting started with the Facebook app is as easy as identifying what page you would like to turn into a mobile app, then choosing the title for the page, icon image, and start-up screen.

Fan page owners can include any information they want from their page in their mobile app, including wall posts, images, and events.

Essentially just a mobile-friendly version of your traditional fan page, the mobile app is accessed by going to a URL (so you’ll have to pass that out to anyone who might want to take advantage of the app).

Since everything in the app comes from your fan page, updating the app’s content is as easy as updating the fan page on Facebook.

Creating a mobile app for a fan page also doesn’t require you to be the owner of that page. So if you have a brand you like to follow, you can create an app for it on your mobile phone that will update as the actual fan page owner updates the page’s content.

Fan Page Mobilizer currently only works for iOS devices, however, an Android version is reportedly on the way soon. The app builder is free for anyone who likes the Facebook app on Facebook. Otherwise, the cost is $5.

More About: android, App, Facebook, iOS, iphone

Many CEOs forbid use of social media at work, but recent research shows that web surfing leads to increased productivity.

This Keas infographic explores the benefits of social media in the workplace, showing that social connections make people happier and a brief recess involving Internet-browsing increases productivity.

An Academy of Management experiment gave three groups of people — a control group bundling sticks, a group taking an Internet-free break and a group browsing the Internet for 10 minutes — the simple task of highlighting as many letter A’s as they could among 2,000 words of text.

The three groups then had their mental exhaustion measured. Those browsing the Internet were 16% more productive than the Internet-free break group and 39% more productive than the control group.

SEE ALSO: 37 Productivity Tips for Working From Anywhere

The study concludes that taking a break, particularly one spent browsing the Internet, should be encouraged by employers hoping to increase productivity.

Do you use Facebook at work? Does it negatively or positively affect your concentration? Sound off in the comments.

More About: Facebook, workplace

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Behind strong pushes on Twitter and YouTube, WWE Wrestlemania XXVIII laid the smack down on social media last weekend, teaching a digital engagement lesson to the sports entertainment world.

The five-hour pay-per-view broadcast at one point had seven of the top nine worldwide trending topics on Twitter. It generated 110 worldwide trends over the show and pre-show’s five hour period, according to Jason Hoch, WWE’s senior vice president of digital.

“We thought the week was a blast, and it was really special to hear from fans over and over just how awesome it was,” Hoch says. “It was really special for us to see fans connecting with our brand in a unique way.”

WWE reps shared a number of other Wrestlemania social stats, exclusive to Mashable:

• A partnership with YouTube to deliver Wrestlemania content gained a total of more than 3.9 million views for the week surrounding the event.
• Despite being a pay-per-view broadcast, Wrestlemania was TV’s most socially engaged program on April 1, according to Trendrr.
• The hashtag #Wrestlemania was mentioned more than 610,000 times on April 1.
• The high level of social engagement delivered record traffic to WWE.com, and a 30% increase over traffic during Wrestlemania the year before.

WWE streamed a kick-off press conference a few days before the event on YouTube and WWE.com, as popular wrestlers answered questions submitted by fans via Twitter. Stars including The Rock, John Cena and Triple H also posted original webisodes to the YouTube homepage during the week. The Rock and Cena complemented their in-ring bout with a “Twitter Face-off”, in which they got fans to battle for tweet supremacy using the hashtags #Cenation and #TeamBringIt. Mike Tyson served as Wrestlemania’s “social media ambassador,” delivering fans behind-the-scenes access through social networks.

“This isn’t a one-off for us,” Hoch says. “This is just continuing to build on the foundation we’ve created.”

WWE ranks among the sports world’s digital leaders. Its Facebook page boasts more than 8 million fans, which Hoch says trails only the NBA on that network. The @WWE Twitter account has more than 1 million followers, and stars such as Cena and The Rock have become huge online as well.

Hoch believes Wrestlemania’s social success this year will have a ripple effect on other organizations.

“To me, it raises the bar for a lot of other players out there,” he says. “We’ve learned a lot from things like the Super Bowl and Grammys, and I think our holistic approach this year really raised the bar for a lot of organizations. But it’s just the start for us.”

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BONUS: Secrets to Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s Social Media Success

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Johnson, who still makes appearances in the wrestling ring, has successfully employed social media to help spread his trademark catchphrases.

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More About: Facebook, Social Media, sports, Twitter