Editor’s Note: Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB)
Facebook and Groupon Win Back Investors, Spur Rally (Bloomberg)
Investors are finally warming up to the hyped Internet stocks they were supposed to love last year.
Shares of three of the Web’s top newly minted stocks — local-reviews site Yelp Inc. (NYSE:YELP) online real-estate site Trulia Inc. (NYSE:TRLA) and social-networking giant Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) — have returned an average 130 percent this year, compared with a 19 percent gain for companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index, amid strong revenue growth and progress in areas like mobile. Even daily-deals company Groupon Inc. (NASDAQ:GRPN), which plummeted as low as 87 percent below its 2011 initial public offering price because of management stumbles and competition, is up 79 percent this year.
The ‘Facebook ETF’ Doesn’t Look So Gimmicky Anymore (Bloomberg)
The Global X Social Media Exchange-Traded Fund (NASDAQ:SOCL) may need its own social media campaign. Its performance so far this year is tweet-worthy: In July alone, the fund rose 16 percent, and it’s up 37 percent for the year. That tops the 12 percent return for the popular Technology Select Sector SPDR ETF and the S&P 500’s 20 percent rise. Yet the ETF has just $11 million in assets.
The fund, which launched in late 2011, was dubbed the Facebook ETF for adding Facebook to its portfolio five days after the stock’s initial public offering — it was the first ETF to hold the stock. Before adding Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB), the ETF was branded a “gimmick” in this CNN Money article and as deserving of the “brush-off” in this MarketWatch article.
Facebook News Feed: popular posts to get more attention (The Telegraph)
In an update to its News Feed, Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) has announced that posts will be shown more prominently for longer if they are popular.The social network’s Lars Backstrom said “The goal of News Feed is to deliver the right content to the right people at the right time so they don’t miss the stories that are important to them. Ideally, we want News Feed to show all the posts people want to see in the order they want to read them.”
Facebook reveals how its news feed works—again (Quartz)
Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) has been trying to explain for months now that no, it is not gaming its news feed and no, it’s not suppressing content that it hasn’t been paid to promote. The company says so clearly in the help pages, under a heading called “How News Feed Works“; it said so in October last year on a sister site aimed at ad agencies and marketers; and it said so again in November, when the Facebook called a bunch of journalists to its offices, sat them down, and had its staff draw big flowcharts on a whiteboard. And that’s just Facebook’s messaging. There are dozens of external sites run by “social media consultants” that answer the same question.
Facebook Graph Search Out For All U.S. English Users, Hiding Timeline Search By Name Setting Dies Today (Techcrunch)
Facebook’s Graph Search, the tool that lets you search in plain language across information shared by friends and anyone on Facebook to find stuff like “People who live in my city from my hometown,” or “Friends of friends who like Paula Dean,” or whatever other weird and terrible combination you can dream up, is now available to all users on the platform with U.S. English set as their default language.