SMEs are set to benefit from even more benefits from Facebook as the social media giant has just announced plans for expansion.

Last week, Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook, announced the remarkable new expansion plans from the website’s New York office.

Sandberg said that Facebook would increase its operations, adding a slew of new engineers to make current features even better and to write code to create new features.

The website currently has more than 800 million users – a figure that could increase as the website itself expands.
In order to facilitate the expansion, Facebook will open an engineering centre in New York City early next year. It will be the first such office for Facebook outside of the West Coast.

Sandberg told journalists at a press conference: “We’ll be adding thousands of employees in the next year.”

The social media behemoth currently employs more than 3000 people in California and 100 in New York.

Recruitment for the New York office has already begun, with Michael Bloomberg, the major of New York City, telling reporters: “They’re accepting applications if any of you need a job.”

The website already offers a wealth of benefits to SME internet marketing through fan pages, targeted ad campaigns and other brand awareness initiatives. It is expected that the new engineers who join Facebook will work to create newer offerings for marketers to help them reach even more clients and consumers.

One of Facebook’s data centre managers has spoken out against rival companies’ decision to keep their data centre designs a secret.

According to a report by tech magazine Wired, Ken Patchett, who manages a Facebook data centre in Prineville, Oregon, USA, has openly criticised the likes of Google for trying to gain a competitive advantage by keeping the designs of their data centres under wraps.

Patchett left Google to join Facebook last year; whilst at Google, he supervised the company’s data centre campus at The Dalles, Oregon.
He told Wired that on joining Google he was made to sign an agreement that would prevent him from sharing any details about Google’s data centre design for at least a year after leaving the organisation.

Patchett said that although this kind of secrecy is commonplace in the industry, it “doesn’t make sense at all” because he thinks that there is in fact no competitive advantage to a company who keeps their data centre design secret.

He told Wired: “How servers work has nothing to do with the way your software works and the competitive advantage comes from manipulating your software.”

Facebook, on the other hand, is very open about its data centre designs. In April it launched the Open Compute Project in order to share the custom-engineered design of its Prineville data centre.

The centre features rows of energy efficient machines which cool the facility with air from the outside instead of electricity-powered water chillers.

It has also published the specs and CAD files for the data centre’s servers, power suppliers and building design on its blog.

Facebook has increased the limit of its status updates.

The social networking giant now has upped its limit to a massive 63,206 characters.

The increase will allow both users and businesses with official pages to post their longest messages yet.

Facebook’s status limit is now 400 times bigger than Twitter’s. Twitter is famous for restricting its status updates to 140 characters, marking an even more distinct contrast now between status provision on both sites.

Speculation as to the reasons behind Facebook’s increase is rife, with the social networking giant remaining relatively cagey about the development.
It is not the first time that Facebook has expanded its status character limit. In March earlier this year it upped the limit tenfold, from 500 to 5000. It has proceeded to increase this a further ten times in the ten months between then and now.

Incredibly, when Facebook was first made available to the general public, it only allowed status updates of 160 characters maximum.

In an official update, a Facebook spokesperson wrote: “You can now write posts with more than 60,000 characters, including status, group and wall posts.

“For reference, a novel has roughly 500,000 characters. This could be shared in nine posts.”

Facebook could be one of the next major tech companies to proclaim its support for Next Gen Skill’s campaign to modernise ICT teaching in schools.

The social media giant is expected to announce its backing for Next Gen Skills, an industry campaign to promote the skills needed for hi-tech growth in the UK.

Next Gen Skills also aims to develop computer science courses for schools that are relevant to industry.

The news will be welcomed by SMEs, who often complain that school-leavers and graduates are not equipped with the real-life skills in areas such as web design to help them drive their businesses forward. A modernised ICT education should help to change this situation, equipping businesses with the workforce they need to compete in the 21st century marketplace.

Next Gen Skills was created following the Livingstone-Hope ‘Next Gen’ review, which recommended that computer science be introduced into the national curriculum as an essential discipline.

Companies that have already proclaimed their support for Next Gen Skills include Google, Microsoft, Nintendo, Electronic Arts, Talk Talk, Sega and the Guardian Media Group.

Alex Hope, joint author of the Next Gen review, asked for organisations across the industry to lend their support to the campaign in order to help force a new curriculum.

“We want them to join us and to highlight the issue, to get that message across to government and to take the opportunities they have to publicise this initiative and keep the dialogue in this domain. Only by doing that can we see change.”

The social media site, that needs no introduction, Facebook, is set to monetise its controversial Ticker feature.

The scrolling news feed, which updates users on their friends’ activities in real time, is about to feature “sponsored stories” – namely, posts that a company can pay for.

The Ticker was one of a number of new features brought to the site in September, many of which proved at least initially unpopular with the Facebook user community. Critics of the Ticker said that it was trying too hard to emulate Twitter’s functionality, and that its constant updating of users’ every move gave too much detail in a manner which was too distracting.

However, Facebook must be feeling confident about Ticker’s future to have made the decision to open it up to advertisers.

Bosses at the social media giant have told various news websites that changes are on the way.

One spokesman told CNN: “We recently made some changes to Facebook that help surface more engaging content, whether paid or organic, to people using Facebook.”

“With these changes, people may see a varying number of ads or Sponsored Stories alongside organic content. In testing, we’ve found this leads to more engagement with for both paid and organic content.” Yet again social networking is put to use for subtle marketing.

Meanwhile, marketing news website ClickZ said that Facebook ads would start to appear in the Ticker from this week.

Skype has integrated Facebook-to-Facebook video-calls into its latest desktop client. This is another stage in the inexorable rise of social media.

Rick Osterloh, head of design at Skype, announced his company’s latest innovation in a blog post last week. He wrote: “ Back in July, Facebook video calling powered by Skype was launched. Today we are thrilled to announce our partnership with Facebook has reached yet another milestone with the launch of Skype 5.4 Beta for Mac and Skype 5.7 Beta for Windows allowing you to conduct a Facebook-to-Facebook call from within Skype.

“This new development in the Skype-Facebook partnership is the latest example of how Skype is removing communication barriers and making it easier to connect with friends, family and business colleagues. Our approach to social is about personal connections with people.

“We are on a mission to connect over one billion people and our continued partnership with Facebook brings us one step closer to this goal.”

Osterloh says that starting a Facebook-to-Facebook call from within Skype is quite easy; all users need to do is connect their Skype and Facebook accounts. They then select a Facebook friend and hit the video call button in Skype, at which point their friend picks up the call from Facebook.

The new feature is the latest in a raft of services offered in partnership with Facebook and Skype. Those already on offer include the ability to see when one’s Facebook friends are online and to read their status updates and IM them all from Skype.

Facebook is the most popular social media site amongst SMEs wanting to promote themselves online.

According to a new survey of 500 SMEs, more than a quarter of SMEs use the site on a regular basis as part of their marketing campaigns.
YouGov’s SME Omnibus survey shows that LinkedIn, the professional social media website, and microblogging site Twitter, are also popular with the UK’s SMEs. Exactly a quarter (25%) of respondents use LinkedIn for promotional purposes, while just less than that (21%) use Twitter.

YouTube fared less well, with only 10% of those surveyed using it to help them promote their goods or services.

Somewhat alarmingly, more than half of respondents said that they never use social media to promote their company. Furthermore, the usage of social media seems to be split geographically. Just under 40% of businesses in the east of England never use social media, compared with a huge 64% of businesses in the north.

Meanwhile, blogging also seems to be a source of confusion. Although 80% of respondents said that they thought blogging was successful in terms of achieving publicity, only 10% of businesses use a blog to help them generate PR.

Just under 70% of SMEs who use social media say that they do so to promote their products and services, whilst 57% do so to promote their brand. Meanwhile, 21% of SMEs use social media to share discounts and promotional offers with their customers.

Nearly 90% of Facebook users say that they hate the new changes to the social media website.

The poll, conducted by community website SodaHead.com, also found that 91% of teenage users said that Facebook had worsened since the update.

If the figures were translated across Facebook’s user base, this would mean that the equivalent of 688million people preferred the social media site before it changed dramatically at the beginning of last month.

The changes included a Twitter-style news ticker at the top right-hand side of the page and a revamped news feed which many users have complained is more difficult to follow than its previous incarnation.

Nearly 80% of the site’s young users said that the website should get rid of the updates, with 89% of women and 78% of men in agreement with them.

The only group surveyed who approved of the changes were IT workers. Some 55% of those in the industry are pleased with the new-look Facebook. Beware web designers!  You may not automatically be on the same wavelength as the people you are designing for.

However, they were in the minority amongst the 1094 people who took part in the survey.

One respondent wrote on the website: “It sucks. Facebook needs to quit trying to ‘keep up with the Googles’ and just be the best version of Facebook.

“It worked because it was simple, uncluttered and didn’t require any thought process. Now, not so much.”

Scientists have discovered a link between the number of friends a Facebook user has and the size of certain regions in their brain.

The discovery suggests that the use of social networking sites might actually change our brains. The specific brain regions in question play a role in memory, emotional responses and social interactions.

Researchers at University College London (UCL) used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to study the brains of 125 university students who were all active Facebook users. They then cross-checked the results against another group of 40 students.

They found a strong connection between the number of Facebook friends and the quantity of grey matter in the amygdala, the right superior temporal sulcus, the left middle temporal gyrus and the right entorhinal cortex. Grey matter is the layer of brain tissue where mental processing happens.

The thickness levels of grey matter in the amygdala were also linked to the amount of real-world friends people had, but the size of the other three regions appeared to be connected only to the amount of online friends that people had.

The students, on average, had around 300 Facebook friends, with the most connected having up to 1,000.

Ryota Kanai of University College London (UCL) said: “The exciting question now is whether these structures change over time. This will help us answer the question of whether the internet is changing our brains.”

The study was published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society.

Debt collectors have been told not to use social media to pursue people.

The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) issued a reminder to businesses last week that using social media to recover consumer credit debts counts as unfair practice.

The warning also applies to banks, law firms and tracing agents as well as traditional debt collectors.

The OFT says that organisations who contact people via social media channels to chase them for money may expose their financial problems on public forums – something that would exacerbate any sense of stress, worry or embarrassment already being felt by the person in debt.

David Fisher, director of consumer credit at the OFT, said: “In the present economic climate, many people, including those who may be particularly vulnerable, are in financial difficulties.

“It is therefore crucial they are treated fairly by companies recovering their debts.”

Social media outlets that some debt collectors are using unfairly include Facebook and Twitter.

Delroy Corinaldi, director of external affairs at the Consumer Credit Counselling Service, told one financial website: “This is a welcome move. Many debtors are understandably anxious to keep their debt problems private from friends and work colleagues – and the possibility of being contacted by a debt collector on Facebook or Twitter causes serious worry for many.”