Facebook’s Open Graph and Like Button are Going Mobile

Facebook’s Open Graph, the platform that extends and spreads Facebook’s social network throughout the web, is going mobile, according to Facebook’s Head of Mobile Products Eric Tseng.
At the MobileBeat 2010 conference in San Francisco, Tseng said that Facebook () “really sees mobile as the future,” and that we can expect to see Facebook’s “Like” buttons in mobile applications soon.
Tseng used geolocation as an example to illustrate the power of the mobile Open Graph. If you were to walk near a coffee shop and get a location-aware notification that there’s a happy hour going on there, you’ll probably be even more inclined to visit it if the notification comes bundled with recommendations from your Facebook friends.
He also had some interesting ideas about mobile app discovery, which he thinks will become more social. Without going into the details, Tseng said that “Inevitably, app stores will become more social. As we get more apps, that’s going to be great. But the average user isn’t going to go through thousands of apps on their phone.”
As far as Facebook’s mobile user base goes, Tseng puts the number at 150 million users, adding that mobile users have fueled Facebook’s immense recent growth.

Online Photo Storage Competition Heats Up

 

Google

The competition for free online photo storage got a little hotter Tuesday.
Google said it has started integrating Picnik, an online photo editing tool that the company purchased in early March, into the Google photo storage Web site, Picasa.
Picasa users will now see a small edit button in the top left corner of their images. When clicked, a version of the photo will pop up into a new window that shows a number of simple and advanced photo editing options.
The simple options allow people to change the shape of an image by rotating, cropping and resizing it. The site also offers tools to change a photos exposure and color.
Another layer of editing features can be found through a tab called “Create,” which offers a number of advanced edit options similar to those found in desktop photo editing applications, including Adobe Photoshop.

Social Media Use in the Workplace on the Rise [STATS]

A new study from Trend Micro shows that more workers around the globe are using social networks while in the office and on the clock.
The survey took a look at the habits of 1,600 Internet () users from the U.S., UK, Germany and Japan and found that over the past two years alone, social web use in the workplace has risen from 19% to 24%. In Germany specifically, social media use at work saw a 10% increase.
It’s still unclear whether this gradual but significant rise is being used to drive our businesses ahead, or if we’re instead wasting our companies’ time and money — a distinction that’s especially important to managers concerned with network security and productivity issues.

BROKEN: No One Could “Like” Anything on Facebook

For about an hour, Facebook’s Like feature wasn’t working at all, either on-site or off. Many websites depend on likes for incoming traffic, so outages like that can be big problems for a lot of people. Facebook moved very quickly to correct the problem.
When the error occurred, anyone who liked something using the “Like” button on a website didn’t see it register on his or her Facebook profile, and they couldn’t even like status updates in their news feeds. Attempts to like news feed updates, photos or other Facebook-hosted content were met with the above database connection error.