Facebook Application Development

If only Facebook IPO day were a little less of a snoozefest than it is now. If only it had Zuckerberg impaling investors while riding a bull rampaging through a city. Or an elevator to space. Or Zuckerberg bouncing Ronald McDonald and the Hamburglar off a giant scale. But sadly, our surrealist dreams will never be realized.

We will just have to settle for the ho-hum performance of Facebook’s shares so far. In the meantime, you can watch this re-enactment from NMA TV or Next Media Animation, that Taiwanese animation subsidiary that riffs off current events with 3D animated videos that look like what the lovechild of Salvador Dali and Reddit would make. Oh, and did we mention that their parent company invests in tech startups too?

Well, they warned us.

Yesterday, Facebook PR was telling reporters that when the company went public this morning, there wouldn’t be much to see at the Menlo Park headquarters. Nonetheless, I made the drive down from San Francisco, and I wasn’t alone. When I arrived at around 6:30am Pacific, the small parking lot set aside for reporters and news vans was already full. Facebook provided coffee and breakfast, as well as a portable bathroom.

Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg received a commemorative hoodie from the NASDAQ CEO Bob Greifeld and thanked his site’s users in opening remarks recorded before he rang the NASDAQ opening bell this morning.

In his short speech which you can watch below, Zuckerberg said:

“I just want to say a few things, and then we’ll ring this bell and we’ll get back to work. Right now this all seems like a big deal. Going public is an important milestone in our history. But here’s the thing: our mission isn’t to be a public company. Our mission is to make the world more open and connected. In the past eight years, all of you out there have built the largest community in the history of the world. You’ve done amazing things that we never would have dreamed of and I can’t wait to see what you’re all going to do going forward.

So on this special day, on behalf of everyone at Facebook, I just want to say to all the people out there who use Facebook and our products, thank you. So let’s do this! [Rings bell] This is an awesome moment. Remember, stay focused and keep shipping” Watch the video here…

Japan’s Consumer Affairs Agency has formally declared that a questionable virtual goods sales method known as “kompu gacha” is illegal, and will penalize companies that continue to engage in the practice. The method, which has contributed to the enormo…

How timely. After launching a year ago at Disrupt NYC 2011, Tracks is today releasing one of its biggest updates to date. The service is much like Color, but without the creepy factor as any and all members of a specific photo-sharing group must be invited. I like to think of it as the place where Color and Google+ Circles intersect, but I far prefer Tracks than either of the former.

Thus far Tracks has offered iOS, web- and real-world versions of your tracks (the collection of photos shared with a specific social network, which can be both geo-temporal or last forever). Today, however, the service gets much more beefy, with the ability to shoot and send real-time video and the addition of new filters, Instagram-style. There are now ten filter options on the app, and they’ll all work on both photos and videos.

But that’s not all.