Facebook’s Oldest Users Jostle for Title

Mark Zuckerberg likely never imagined this when he founded Facebook as an undergraduate in his Harvard dorm room.

The website he created as a social network for college students is now the site of a brewing battle between two centenarians over who can lay claim to being the oldest among Facebook’s more than 1 billion monthly users.

Logged on in one corner is Florence Detlor, the 101-year-old Californian who, in August, was designated Facebook’s oldest user by Zuckerberg and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. Detlor traveled to the social network’s Palo Alto campus for a personal tour.

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In the other corner is a New Mexico woman, Maria “Mary” Colunia Segura-Metzgar, who just celebrated her 105^th birthday on Tuesday and has her own Facebook page, complete with 86 friends.

Segura-Metzgar, however, is so far removed from the typical Facebook user that she had to shave a few years off her age in order to join the site, according to her 60-year-old grandson, Anthony Segura, who is responsible for signing her up.

“I tried to sign her up on Facebook a few months ago but it wouldn’t accept her birth date,” Segura told ABCNews.com today.  “Then I tried again and just put in 101 and it accepted it for the timeline, even though she was 104.”

“Now on Facebook it says she’s 102 when, in reality, she’s 105,” he said.

Segura, who said his grandmother is too hard of hearing to be interviewed by phone, said he has tried to reach Facebook to rectify the problem, but they have been unresponsive.  A call placed to Facebook by ABC News was not returned as of this writing.

Even though the title would be nice, Segura says it was a much more important reason why he got his grandmother to join Facebook.

“We want to let everybody know in the family that she’s still alive and kicking,” he said.

Segura-Metzgar, known as “Grandmother Mary” to her nearly 40 grandchildren, “too many to count” great-grandchildren and two new great-great-grandchildren born just this week, lives just a few miles away from Segura and his wife, Mayra, in Albuquerque.  They visit her frequently to let her use their iPad to log on and update her page, most recently with photos from her 105^th birthday party.

“She’s still very sharp and likes to tell stories of her life and we wanted to be able to record her life as a legacy,” said Segura.  “We’re a very large family and there’s a lot of stories that a lot of the family doesn’t know and we wanted to be able to capture those.  Since ‘Timeline’ came out we thought it was a good idea to put those [stories] on Facebook to have a timeline of her life.”

Segura is also tasked with keeping his grandmother’s friends list to just family and friends, no small task considering he had to deny more than 50 friend requests just Wednesday from curious onlookers.

That same fate befell Florence Detlor, Segura-Metzgar’s younger competition, who, after her personal visit with Zuckerberg and Sandberg was made public, had too many friend requests for the site to process new ones.

Segura-Metzgar, a twice-widowed mother of four, is one of 10 children whose 99-year-old and 97-year-old sisters and “a couple brothers” are still alive, according to Segura.  While she is the only one of her siblings to take on the World Wide Web, Segura-Metzgar hasn’t given up on the old-fashioned way of getting her news and staying in touch either.

“She loves to watch TV and read the newspaper, she’s always done that all her life and she still does it to this day,” Segura said.  ” She’s very involved in politics.  She won’t tell us who she’s going to vote for but she will be voting.”

Source : abcnews[dot]go[dot]com

Facebook hits 1 billion active monthly users, celebrates with a video ad

Facebook celebrates 1 billion active monthly users today. The announcement came from the social network’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook’s company blog. He also used the occasion to post some more impressive stats.

Since the launch of the Likes feature on Facebook in 2009, there have been more than 1.13 trillion likes. Over 140.3 billion friend connections in total were made and 219 billion photos uploaded.

The mind-blowing numbers continue with 17 billion location-tagged posts and 62.6 million songs played about 22 billion times. Wow.

The average user age is around 22 with top five countries being Brazil, India, Indonesia, Mexico and The U.S.

Mark Zuckerbeg also posted a personal note, where he expresses his gratitude to Facebook users.

This morning, there are more than one billion people using Facebook actively each month. If you’re reading this: thank you for giving me and my little team the honor of serving you. Helping a billion people connect is amazing, humbling and by far the thing I am most proud of in my life. I am committed to working every day to make Facebook better for you, and hopefully together one day we will be able to connect the rest of the world too.

Today’s achievement was celebrated with Facebook’s first ever advertisement. Check it out below.

Source : blog[dot]gsmarena[dot]com

Zuckerberg talk restores investor confidence….a little bit

Following Mark Zuckerberg's Q&A in San Francisco on Tuesday, Facebook shares climbed by $1.50 to $20.93, though this still leaves them some way below the launch price of $38.

When Mark Zuckerberg took to the stage at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, he was well aware of the importance of what was his first interview since Facebook went public back in May.

With shares hitting a low of $17.55 last week – way down from their $38 launch price – the 28-year-old CEO was keen to calm the nerves of investors by clearing up various issues surrounding the social networking site and its plans for the future.

The 30-minute appearance evidently did some good, with stock rising $1.50, or 7.7 percent, to $20.93 in trading on Wednesday. It may not have been the kind of increase he’d been hoping for, but hey, it’s heading in the right direction – for now, at least.

Speaking to the LA Times about Zuckerberg’s performance, Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter said, ”He said what he needed to: He and Facebook care about shareholders, he is aware of and troubled by the low share price, he appears to believe the stock is undervalued, and appears to understand that he has to communicate Facebook’s strategy more clearly going forward.”

Another analyst, Macquarie Securities’ Ben Schachter, said it was vital for Zuckerberg to make more appearances like this, enabling him to communicate with investors directly. “Better understanding Zuckerberg’s priorities, motivation and general focus is a positive for investors,” Schachter said.

At Disrupt’s Q&A on Tuesday, Zuckerberg said the performance of the company’s stock “has obviously been disappointing” but added that “we do things to build value over the long term.”

Earlier this month, in another attempt to restore investor confidence, Facebook said in an SEC filing that Zuckerberg has no intention of selling any of his more than 500 million Facebook shares for at least the next year.

The announcement came after some of the company’s major investors unloaded a portion of their stock. Early investor Peter Thiel unloaded the majority of his shares – about 20 million of a total of 25 million – in the middle of August, followed a few days later by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, who sold a much smaller amount.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com