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Facebook Messenger for Windows launched, Mac version coming

Facebook today officially introduced Facebook Messenger for Windows. “You should be able to stay in touch anytime, no matter what you’re doing,” a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement. “So today we’re introducing Messenger, a new app that brings Facebook to your desktop.” The word “Messenger” is a link to facebook.com/about/messenger where you can download the desktop client.

If you’re getting a huge feeling of déjà vu, you’re not alone: Facebook Messenger for Windows was officially released in December 2011. The client leaked out early and Facebook responded by telling journalists like myself about the Facebook Help Center page detailing the new application, and by releasing an official download link. Here’s what I wrote at the time:

Facebook would not confirm the version number with me (update: I figured out it’s version 2.0.4373.0), but given that the application updates automatically, I think Menlo Park made a decision to officially release it instead of trying to combat the leak. Smart move.

If you’re wondering, the current version is 2.0.4430.0. The application, which requires Windows 7, provides access to three main Facebook features: Facebook Chat, the new Ticker feed, and notifications. Here’s how Facebook puts it:

  • Chat while you do other stuff: See and respond to chats right from your desktop. You don’t have to click away to stay connected.
  • Get notified instantly: Find out about new comments, photo tags and more as soon as they come in.
  • See what’s going on anytime: Stay up to date with an active stream of posts and activity from your friends. Just click to leave a comment or see more.

So, what does this application require to keep you updated? First and foremost, you must be logged into Facebook. After you click on the blue “Log In” button pictured above, you will redirected to the facebook.com/desktop/login webpage where Facebook explains that Messenger for Windows requires you stay logged in so that it can deliver chat and notification messages to your desktop. This means you will stay logged into Facebook even after you close your browser. To log out of Facebook, you’ll need to actually do so from Facebook Messenger for Windows.

In addition to being a standalone application, Facebook Messenger for Windows can be snapped to the side of the screen; that’s probably why it only works for Windows 7. Facebook has hinted at a few upcoming features for the Windows flavor already: chatting with multiple friends, video calling, limiting chat availability, and editing settings.

Facebook believes users want to use the social network’s real-time features without having to keep a browser window open. The social networking giant is clearly hoping that users will leave Messenger for Windows on throughout the day, probably since most Facebook addicts already do so with a browser tab. In addition to Windows 7, Facebook Messenger is also already available for Android, iPhone, and BlackBerry.

All of this we already knew before. The only real new tidbits today are that Facebook is now asking for your comments on the application over at “Your Feedback: Messenger for Windows.” The other bit of new information is that Facebook is “busy working on Messenger for Mac. Stay tuned.”

It’s not clear if Facebook plans to offer support for anything before Windows 7, but I would wager the company will simply move on towards Windows 8. A Linux client is even less likely, but you never know.

See also:

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Zynga Cannot Kick Facebook Addiction


SAN FRANCISCO, CA - DECEMBER 09: The Zynga lo...

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

While Zynga has finally launched its own platform for social gaming, [1] we do not expect its reliance on Facebook to decrease significantly anytime soon.

Facebook remains the website where users spend a majority of their time online, and that is precisely why social games get the necessary engagement they require.

Zynga would now be faced with the additional challenge of building a comparable scale for its own gaming platform, which is a tough feat to achieve.

See our complete analysis for Facebook

Facebook Does Not Need To Worry For Now

The very foundation of social gaming is that the “play-as-you-go” nature of the games, as opposed to traditional games that require dedicated time to play. By this logic, users are more likely to play these games as part of a broader social network as opposed to a dedicated social gaming site.

Additionally, a social network like Facebook is necessary to bring in new potential players to Zynga by leveraging its +800 million user base. In short, Zynga’s own gaming platform would face challenges of both scale and user engagement when compared to Facebook.

Having said that, Facebook’s own reliance on Zynga for its revenues is substantial. 12% of Facebook’s 2011 revenues came from Zynga, generated from both Facebook credits as well the ads that appear on Zynga’s games. [2]

Facebook is very well aware of this contribution, and will be watching closely whether Zynga’s zCloud infrastructure manages to eat up Facebook’s revenue share in Zynga. However, Facebook’s deal with Zynga mandates that it earns 30% of every virtual good transaction till May 2015, and this should continue to bring in healthy revenues for the company.

The updated Trefis valuation for Facebook stands at roughly $74 billion based on the revisions to our forecasts for Facebook’s metrics, including revenues, EBITDA margins, capital expenditures and net working capital.

Understand How a Company’s Products Impact its Stock Price at Trefis

Notes:

  1. Zynga Unveils new Platform For Play, Zynga Press Releases, 1st March 2012 [↩]
  2. Facebook’s S-1 Registration Statement, Securities and Exchange Commission, 1st Feb 2012 [↩]

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Zynga shares retreat after JPMorgan downgrade

NEW YORK (AP) — Shares of Zynga Inc. gave back some of last week’s gains after a JPMorgan analyst downgraded the online game company based on the recent stock price increase.

THE SPARK: The analyst, Doug Anmuth, downgraded Zynga to “Neutral” from “Overweight” after Zynga‘s stock 51 percent gain since late January. That compares with only a 7 percent increase for the Nasdaq and a 4 percent increase of the Standard Poor’s 500 index.

Investors drop up the price because of optimism about its games platform, Zynga.com, and the possibility that online gambling will be legalized, he said. He said he agrees with those positions, but thinks it will take a long time for the company to benefit from them.

Anmuth said that despite his downgrade, he still thinks that the company also stands to benefit from increased smartphone and tablet use and users’ shift toward free games. Zynga’s games, which include “CityVille” and “FarmVille,” are free to play and the company makes most of its money from charging for virtual items in the games.

BACKGROUND: Zynga went public in December, one in a group of social Web companies that includes LinkedIn Corp., Groupon Inc. and Yelp Inc.

Zynga’s stock closed below its $10 IPO price on its first trading day. Since then, though, the stock has advanced, gaining nearly 14 percent just last week as the company announced the launch of Zynga.com, its own gaming destination off of Facebook. Investors saw the move as a sign that the company is reducing its dependence on Facebook.

Zynga players will still use their Facebook account information to log in to Zynga.com when it launches this month, and they will still use Facebook Credits to pay for virtual items in Zynga’s games.

SHARE ACTION: San Francisco-based Zynga’s shares fell 72 cents, or 4.9 percent, to $13.97 in late afternoon trading. The stock has ranged from $7.97 and $15.91 since its initial public offering.

Spoiler Chat Daily: An Unlikely Friendship on Smash! Plus, Scoop on How I Met Your Mother and More!

Neil Patrick Harris, How I Met Your Mother, Megan Hilty, Smash, David Boreanaz, Bones Ron P. Jaffe/FOX; Patrick Harbron/NBC; Ray Mickshaw/FOX

Is there any better drama than Broadway drama? Karen (Katharine McPhee) and Ivy (Megan Hilty) may be at each other’s throats now, but if anything can bring them together on Smash, it’s a common enemy.  

Plus, a How I Met Your Mother mystery is about to pop back in, and Jiminy Cricket is coming back to Once Upon a Time in a big way. All that, and scoop on Bones, Modern Family, American Horror Story and more in today’s Spoiler Chat…

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Kenny in Greenfield, N.C.: I need to know if Ivy and Karen could ever be friends on Smash…
Not anytime soon. But wait it out, because something is coming up on Smash that’ll unite both Ivy (Megan Hilty) and Karen (Katharine McPhee), and that could possibly lead to a tentative friendship. It’s definitely enough for them to have a number together, but that performance has to do with the Marilyn musical, so it won’t exactly be them holding hands singing “We Are Family.”

j5fanl: When will we finally see Ted in the green dress from season six’s “The Mermaid Theory” on HIMYM?
There are many HIMYM storylines that are still up in the air: pineapples, slaps, oh, and of course the small matter of the mother, but co-creator Craig Thomas revealed details to us about that exact vignette you’re referring to. “The weirdest one is that last year Ted (Josh Radnor) was in a dress and it was a flash-forward. He stumbles in and he seems OK with it, weirdly, but he says: ‘Now we’re even!’ to Barney (Neil Patrick Harris).” Now that we’ve refreshed your memory, here is the top-secret plan: “There’s obviously some sort of weird bet by which Ted had to put on a dress, and we have to answer that one. I’ll confess that that one is a little bit of a mystery to us.”

jacobsjj: anything on Jiminy Cricket on OUAT? feels like he hasn’t been on in a few episodes.
Don’t worry, he’s coming back with a bang! In Storybrooke, Dr. Hooper (Raphael Sbarge) will have a few new clients sitting on his couch: James (Josh Dallas) and Mr. Gold (Robert Carlyle)! In the fairy-tale world, Jiminy will be leading an intervention for [spoiler]!

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BONES, Emily Deschanel,David Boreanaz Greg Gayne/FOX

leriam10: please something to help get over this Bones dry spell.
Someone from Booth’s (David Boreanaz) past will be resurfacing! Don’t panic, Booth and Bones (Emily Deschanel) lovers, this someone will not be looking to wreck any homes: It’s a man Booth became friends with after serving in Afghanistan after 9/11 together.

Carrie in Denver: The dual realities in Awake rock my world. Tell me more!
So glad so many of you liked it. We can tell you that the true reality won’t be revealed this season, but the dream world will definitely continue to help Detective Michael Britten solve his cases. Jason Isaacs plays coy when talking about it: “If something happens in one world that leads him to something in the other world, it’s because he might have noticed that thing in his first world without realizing it. And sometimes we do something even more controversial that hopefully will make people wonder if there is magic going on.”

Joseph in Costa Mesa, Calif: Any Grimm scoop? It’s my new obsession!
Grimm is taking a page out of Once Upon a Time‘s fairy-tale book! Yes, we’ll soon be meeting NBC’s version of Prince Charming. The biggest difference? His significant other, who may or may not be a supernatural creature.

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Dylan McDermott, American Horror Story Ray Mickshaw / FX

Marcie: Is there a chance at all any of the Harmons will come back on American Horror Story? I loved them so much!
Hey, we love that ghost family as much as the next guy, but according to Ryan Murphy, the Harmons’ story is done and done. However, he did say at Paley that anyone could pop up at any time. And Dylan McDermott also told us that he has a hard time saying “no” to Murphy when we asked if he’d come back to AHS as someone else.

Melissa: Long shot but…got anything on Covert Affairs?
Ask and you shall receive. Covert Affairs is on the hunt for a new series regular who will act as Annie’s (Piper Perabo) mentor and confidant. Of course we’ll find out over the course of the season that there is more to her than meets the eye. Fingers crossed she’s a transformer of some kind, because that would be awesome.

Trisha in Appleton, Wisc: Anything Modern Family please!
We’re loving Modern Family so much this season it hurts when we laugh, but our hearts still long for the reappearance of Haley’s on-and-off-again rocker beau Dylan (Reid Ewing). Don’t try and deny that “Under the Moonlight (Do Me)” is one of the greatest singles of 2009! With that being said, we’re hoping that our void for a quirky male teen will soon be filled in the season finale with this character: Peter, 17, is intelligent, cute and no stranger to Coco Chanel’s rule regarding accessories. We’ll let your mind ponder how his metrosexual ways will fit into the family…

The Spoiler Chat is now happening every single day!  Send your questions via email to tvdiva@eonline.com, or via Twitter to @kristindsantos.

—Additional reporting by Jenna Mullins, Tierney Bricker, Leanne Aguilera and Rachel Brethauer

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Patricia Hunt Sinacole is president of First Beacon Group LLC, a human resources consulting firm in Hopkinton. She works with clients across many industries including technology, biotech and medical devices, financial services, and healthcare, and has over 20 years of human resources experience.

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Facebook Can Tell You If A Person Is Worth Hiring

Don Kluemper of Northern Illinois University helped conduct a study that suggests a person’s Facebook page can predict job performance and academic success (Image via NIU Today)

Employers already know it’s a good idea to check job candidates’ Facebook pages to make sure there aren’t any horrible red flags there. The reddest flags for most employers seem to be drugs, drinking, badmouthing former employers, and lying about one’s qualifications. But there’s another good reason for checking out a candidate’s Facebook page before inviting them in for an interview: it may be a fairly accurate reflection of how good they’ll be at the job.

That’s the conclusion in a study published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology last month. The researchers hired HR types to rate hundreds of college students’ Facebook pages according to how employable they seemed.

“We asked them to form impressions of a candidate based solely on their Facebook page,” says one of the study author’s, Don Kluemper, of Northern Illinois University. This involved looking at what was publicly available on those pages (photos, status updates, and conversations with friends) and then assigning each person a score for a number of qualities important to being a good employee, such as their degree of emotionally stability, conscientiousness, extroversion, intellectual curiosity and agreeableness. (In other words, will they flip out on you, care about completing tasks, be fun to work with, be creative in problem solving, and be willing to kiss up when necessary?) The review took about five to ten minutes per profile.

Six months later, the researchers got in touch with their guinea pigs’ employers to ask about their job performances. Unfortunately, of the over 500 guinea pigs, just 56 of the employers responded. So the sample is small, but the researchers found a strong correlation between those employers’ reviews and the employability predictions they had made based on folks’ profile pages.

I asked Kluemper about the “personality red flags” that their reviewers looked for. He was a little vague but said that a person with obvious mood swings, who is overly emotional in their postings would not be an attractive candidate. Meanwhile, a person with a lot of Facebook friends who takes a lot of crazy photos would be rated as extroverted and friendly — which are attractive qualities in a candidate.

Key takeaway for hiring employers: The Facebook page is the first interview; if you don’t like a person there, you probably won’t like working with them. The bad news for employers, though, who are hoping to take the Facebook shortcut: “So many more profiles are restricted in what the public can access,” says Kluemper.

Given the small sample size for that first study, I was more impressed by the second. In the second study, the researchers did a similar assessment of students’ Facebook selves and also had the students take personality and IQ tests. Then, instead of following up with employers, they turned to students’ transcripts. “We were able to better predict a student’s academic success based on their Facebook page than on the cognitive tests,” says Kluemper.

(Most universities claim they don’t stalk applicants on social networking sites during the admissions process. Maybe they should?)

Of course, there are some legal questions to think about before jumping into someone’s Facebook page. Employers can discriminate against potential employees who seem like bummers based on their Wall postings and interests, but will get into trouble if what the Facebook user has said about their religious views affects the hiring process.

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