Facebook Confirms Share Price at $38, Making It the Biggest Tech IPO the Web Has Ever Seen
You've been hearing about it for months. Facebook is going public tomorrow, and it's going to be big. Massive. Crazy. Expect to see tiny little dollar signs in everybody's pupils.
Facebook just announced the pricing of its initial public offering, setting it at $38 per share of its 421,233,615 shares in common stock and raising $16 to $18.4 billion, valuing the company at $104 billion. Just for an interesting reference, Google's IPO valuation was priced at $24.6 billion and was criticized of being overvalued at the time of offering on August 19, 2004.
Photo © Getty Images
Although Facebook's offering is indeed the biggest tech/Internet IPO we've ever seen, it only ranks second behind Visa as the biggest IPO of all time. Visa Inc.'s public offering in 2008 brought in $19.65 billion.
Still, the IPO is extremely impressive for a website that started off less than a decade ago as a something college kids mainly used to share drunk bar photos of themselves. Very impressive, indeed.
Facebook shares will begin trading on the NASDAQ under the symbol "FB" tomorrow, May 18.
Google Takes another Big Step toward Making Your Search Experience Even Better
On Wednesday, Google revealed that it would be implementing something new called the Knowledge Graph, so don't be surprised if you notice something different about your Google searches. After all, it's there to benefit you.
The general idea of the new Knowledge Graph is to deliver more search results now that Google understands relationships and connections between strings of words.
Most of us can say that we've tried typing a phrase into Google hoping for only the best, only to discover obscure and totally irrelevant results pop up.
Now, Google is able to tell the difference between certain trends. Take them ambiguous term "penguins" as an example. You may be looking for information on the NHL hockey team or the Antarctic bird.
Whichever specific meaning for you're looking for, Google can identify the difference and lump related search results according to each entity now. A new window should appear on the side asking which particular meaning you want to know more about.
And this is good. Google has come one step closer to delivering the best search results that it can.
Check out Wednesday's blog post from the official Google blog on the Knowledge Graph to find out more.
There Are Over 1 Billion People Using Social Media
Just a decade ago, we never could have imagined how interconnected our lives would become today, thanks to social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Tumblr, Pinterest and all the rest of them.
The International Telecommunication Union released a new report revealing that the number of people who use social media sites have passed one billion, and most of our social media activity is coming from mobile devices.
Photo © Tricia Shay Photography
It's not much of a surprise, given that Facebook now has over 900 million users and the extreme popularity of smartphone devices and tablet computers continues to grow.
The social web and the mobile web are still very young, so there's no telling what the next big trend might be ten or twenty years from now. But if you'd like to experience kind of an interesting perspective on how the web has grown and evolved since its creation, I recommend checking out my latest "must read" article, The Evolution of the Web in 1000 Words.
And if you haven't checked out the latest spotlight article yet on the top five free cloud storage services, I suggest you do that as well!
This is going to be a big week for the web. I can feel it. (Facebook IPO, anyone? Yep, it's coming!)
Viddy Is Soon Expected to Hit 30 Million Users
Well, that was fast, wasn't it? Viddy is definitely one of those apps that seems like it came out of nowhere with a user base exploding practically overnight, kind of like what we saw with Draw Something back in February and March.
But unlike Draw Something, Viddy is showing no signs of slowing down.
After just a couple weeks, Viddy managed to attract over 27 million users and is adding about half a million new users each day.
And according to Venture Beat, the creators of Viddy just closed $30 million funding round.
Things sure are looking up for this little video app.
Viddy's huge success kind of caught me by surprise, especially since I had experimented once with a similar app called Keek. I had been rooting for Keek, partly because it was awesome and partly because it's a Toronto-based startup. Unfortunately, it hasn't experienced the same viral success that Viddy has recently seen.
If you want to learn more about Viddy, check out my review.
Google+ Notification Emails Get an Interactive Kick from within Gmail
Ever wish you could view, comment or give +1 on a post from within a Google+ email?
Well, now you can, because starting today, Google is giving us all "a better Google+ notification experience in email."
Unfortunately for me, this won't help at all since I've turned all those pesky notification emails off and also rarely check my G+ stream. But anyway, for the Google+ power user (if there are any), this new feature may be at least a little bit useful. In addition to being able to add G+ users to circles and view content in the people widget, you can now also do the following right from within Gmail:
- View, comment and give +1 from G+ notification emails
- See the activity you do within Gmail appear on G+ in real-time
- See activity and responses from other users appear in real-time within Gmail
Replying to notifications can also be done on a mobile device as well. You can check out Google's official blog post for more information on that.
Facebook Social News Applications: Yay or Nay?
If you're on Facebook, you've more than likely already come across stories in your news feed that say "So and so read an article on _____." Fill in the blank with Yahoo! or the Guardian or the Washington Post or some other well-known news medium.
Love 'em or hate 'em, they've been popping up all over the place on Facebook for the past little while, and on Monday, BuzzFeed FWD reported that these social readers were apparently "collapsing" and even "falling off a cliff right now."
I was happy to hear it, because I couldn't stand the darned things and had been frantically pressing the "hide" button on all of them whenever they appear. BuzzFeed included bunch of fancy graphs were included to help prove it, along with a few dramatic Twitter and Facebook reactions to the BuzzFeed article.
Not surprisingly, BuzzFeed's entire business is to do just what its name says--feed you buzz. All of us haters really wanted to hear that the social readers are doomed. Reading that headline was like ice cream in my ears, and all I wanted to do was share the glorious news, which I did by tweeting the BuzzFeed link on Twitter. Darn you BuzzFeed and your sneaky viral tactics!
So, a lot of us were led to believe that these social news apps were indeed collapsing because everyone just got ticked off by all the noisy news feed garbage.
But no! That's not actually what happened.
Shortly after, Inside Facebook reported that the social readers aren't collapsing at all, and each news medium has experienced mixed results. TechCrunch also pointed out today that any drop in social news reader use is likely a result of Facebook's transition to showing something new called "trending articles," which groups together fewer articles and appears less often.
Ta-da! Makes more sense, right? It was too easy to jump to the hostile conclusion that everyone just got super annoyed with the social readers, which BuzzFeed kind of made the mistake of doing (maybe even on purpose for the sake of making it go viral) rather than looking deeper into the trend. Hopefully they'll make it up to us by posting another viral photo-only article of adorable corgis in top hats or tiny turtles at tea parties.
Latest Article: Chill.com Is Pinterest for Social Video Sharing
Foursquare Introduces Check-In History Pages
There's something new and shiny in Foursquare land. Today, the popular location-based service launched its new searchable history pages to give users the opportunity to easily view their past venue checkins in timeline format.
The new history pages can be accessed via Foursquare.com for the web and look similar to what you see on the check-in history tabs for their mobile apps.
I rarely access Foursquare via the web and almost always just stick to using the app, but the new history pages might actually force me to look over the places I've been and add them to favorites or hotspot lists. As you scroll down, you also get a nice glimpse of all the comments or photos that were included with each checkin.
And you can even narrow down past venue check-ins by searching for a particular name, category, or friend you were with at the time. Not bad.
Check it out. Sign-in to Foursquare and then visit Foursquare.com/history.
Who Still Uses Digg? The Social Bookmarking Site's Days May Be Limited
There are rumors floating around that the once popular bookmarking site Digg is being acquired by the Washington Post. TechCrunch reported that the staff has been acquired, but the site itself has not.
Anthony Ha explains, "In other words, this is a talent acquisition, and in fact Digg properties, patents, and assets are still for sale."
So Digg staff will be heading over there to work on enhancing and perfecting current projects with the Washington post, but does that mean the actual Digg site will get shut down for good? It's hard to say for certain, but it definitely looks like it might happen.
So long, Digg. It was nice knowing you, but I honestly haven't used you in years.
Latest Article: 10 Great Bookmarking Tools
Help 99designs Come Up with an Awesome New Look for Their Homepage
If you're into design, you're probably going to want to listen up.
It looks like 99designs is preparing for a big homepage design overhaul. And as the top online marketplace for crowdsourced designs, they've launched a pretty cool contest that gives designers the opportunity to completely redesign their homepage--with a nice reward of $1,000 for the top three winning designs.
Screenshot of 99design's current homepage.
You've still got another week and five days to enter the qualifying round before the judges select the finalists. Once the finalists have been chosen, the designers enter the final round of the contest and the top winners will be selected.
The great thing about this contest is that 99designs is basically open to anything in terms of design, so you have maximum flexibility.
This is your chance to really get creative and potentially get your work permanently hosted right on the front page of a really popular website. Pretty cool, if you ask me.
The full description and contest rules can be found here.
Good luck!
Text-Only Instagram Is the Latest Must-Follow Twitter Account
Sheesh, April sure has been a good month for Instagram. And now that Android owners are busy taking irrelevant hipster photos and Facebook has already announced that it's forking over a billion smackeroos to acquire the popular vintage photo app, it looks like we've got something new to tell you about that's Instagram-related.
As if you needed it, right?
Introducing Instagram without all the visual stuff. Because who needs it when you already know what's expected? This is text-only, my friends.
Looks like Twitter user @Digeratii set up a Twitter account and named it Text-Only Instagram sometime yesterday, describing it as "Your personal Instagram feed in a lightweight text format."
And that's exactly what it is.
Instagram has become so popular that it's about time somebody made a huge satire out of it.
You can picture every single text-only descriptive yet scenic tweet in your mind, set with a nice X-Pro II or Sierra photo filter of course. Even for people who love using the app, the text-only tweets are hilarious to read.
Just a few minutes ago, I came across one of @textinstagram's tweets that said:
"Female hand grasping expensive beverage"
Ha. I just did this, last week.
Here's proof. (Tim Horton's is really not that expensive, but still.)
You win, Text-Only Instagram.
Find @textinstagram on Twitter here. The account already has over 16,000 followers.