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Facebook boosts ad targeting with partner categories

Ever amping up new ways for advertisers to engage with users, Facebook began rolling out a new feature today that doubles down on the social network's use of ad targeting.

Dubbed "partner categories," Facebook's new feature aims to target ads to more categories of people. These categories use data from third parties, such as Acxiom, Datalogix, and Epsilon, to glean information about what users buy on the Web.

Here's more from a Facebook blog post:

For example, a local car dealership can now show ads to people who are likely in the market for a … Read more

Facebook adds icons and links to status updates

Facebook is adding a new twist to status updates as of today. Any TV show, movie, or book that users mention in their status update will also contain an icon and link to the Facebook page of whatever's mentioned.

"For example, if you share that you're watching a movie like 'Jurassic Park,' your post will contain the movie icon and a link to the movie's page," Facebook wrote in a blog post today. "'Jurassic Park' will be added to the Movies section on your timeline."

In other words, those TV shows, movies, or … Read more

Facebook creates a beautiful, though broken, Home on Android

Facebook finds the heart of your smartphone with Facebook Home, a family of applications that bring social-networking mainstays such as the News Feed and Facebook Messenger to your mobile device in radically altered designs.

The software package, shown off at a press event last week, is moving to select Android devices April 12. The HTC First, the first handset optimized for Facebook Home, hits the market on the same day, exclusively with AT&T.

After spending a few days with a review unit of the HTC First, I believe Facebook has created a visually arresting mobile home like no … Read more

Facebook and GM restore ad relationship after public spat

When General Motors pulled its $10 million advertising campaign from Facebook last year, it caused quite a commotion. Now, the carmaker seems to be having second thoughts.

GM has confirmed that it will reignite its ad campaign on the social network, according to Ad Age. This is a major turnaround from last year, when it proclaimed that Facebook ads simply didn't work.

"Chevrolet is testing a number of mobile-advertising solutions, including Facebook, as part of its 'Find New Roads' campaign," Chevrolet's U.S. VP of marketing, Chris Perry, told CNET. "Yesterday, Chevrolet launched an industry-first, '… Read more

Facebook members in U.K. must pay to hob-knob with celebs

Facebook users in the U.K. are being treated to the same premium charges their counterparts in the U.S. have been hit with when sending messages to certain high-profile members on the social network, as well as people outside their circle of friends.

According to U.K. news site The Sunday Times, Facebook users in the U.K. late last week started being charged as much as 10 British pounds (about $15) to send messages to celebrity-status Facebook members. Olympic diver Tom Daley and former Children's laureate Michael Rosen are the most expensive celebrities to contact.

Facebook last year announced what it called a "small experiment" … Read more

Facebook Home leaks out before its official release

Facebook Home, the social network's latest, major push into the mobile devices arena, has been leaked before its official debut in the marketplace.

Mobile news site MoDaCo obtained a copy of a prerelease build of Facebook Home from an HTC First ROM. The site reports that the installation is "rather buggy and incomplete" and it couldn't get the platform's Chat Heads to work.

However, many of Facebook Home's other features were accessible, and MoDaCo published photos of the application in action. For those who want to take the risk of running prerelease software, MoDaCo … Read more

The sharing (and selling) of Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg

Once they've made a movie about you, can you ever be you again?

Perhaps that depends on whether you were you in the first place. Or rather, whether the you that people saw had very much to do with the real human being that lived inside your body.

This has been the dilemma of Mark Zuckerberg for some time.

As his ambitions (and Facebook) got bigger and bigger, as his contempt for any norms of privacy exceeded those of your most nosy grandmother, he suddenly had to appear in the public eye.

Yes, the man who peddled sharing as … Read more

Facebook actually sorry for banning breastfeeding pic

Facebook's relationship with breastfeeding mothers has some Oedipal tinges.

It seems that ever since the site became populated by people who weren't university students desperate to find a warm body, Facebook has shivered at the site of anything that resembled a naked breast.

Even when it was actually an elbow.

Though breastfeeding mothers have always railed against Facebook's anti-breast policies, the company has always claimed that it is a medium, and therefore abides by the same standards as other media.

This is odd, because at the launch of Facebook Home, Mark Zuckerberg insisted that Facebook was actually … Read more

One-on-one with the guy who built Facebook's Home

If Facebook Home, the company's family of applications that make the social network unavoidable on Android devices such as the HTC First, had an architect, it would be Director of Product and project lead Adam Mosseri.

CNET sat down with Mosseri on Thursday after the company lifted the curtain on Home. Mosseri proved a lively interview subject. He didn't completely divert away from our first serious question as to why anyone would want this much Facebook in their phone, and he admitted that if you don't want to see the feed all the time, then this isn'… Read more