Facebook, Inc. (Facebook) is engaged in building products to create utility for users, developers, and advertisers. People use Facebook to stay connected with their friends and family, to discover what is going on in the world around them, and to share and express what matters to them to the people they care about. Developers can use the Facebook Platform to build applications and Websites that integrate with Facebook to reach its global network of users and to build personalized and social products. Advertisers can engage with more than 900 million monthly active users (MAUs) on Facebook or subsets of its users based on information they have chosen to share with the Company, such as their age, location, gender, or interests. In September 2013, Mail.Ru Group Limited sold its remaining shares in Facebook Inc. Effective September 25, 2013, Facebook Inc acquired Mobile Technologies, a developer of online applications. In October 2013, Facebook Inc acquired Onavo Inc. ||||| Graph Search: Facebook’s Way of Keeping You Inside of Facebook (Video) 
 
 At its Menlo Park headquarters on Tuesday, Facebook unveiled its take on search, the social giant’s major push into helping its users find content from within Facebook. 
 
 For as big as Facebook has grown, something like this has been sorely needed. More than one billion people are on Facebook’s network, with upward of 240 billion photos and more than a trillion connections within the social graph. For anyone looking for a specific topic of information, place or person, that’s a lot of stuff to sort through. 
 
 “Indexing all this content and making it so you can find it easily is a really hard problem,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said. “Graph search is designed to take a precise query and return to you the precise answer.” 
 
 What does that mean? Essentially, Facebook wants to make it easier for users to find stuff from within a user’s network of social connections, without having to exit the site. A search box topping the page prompts you to enter a search string that returns information relevant to your network. 
 
 The thesis is this: Web search is about returning links to keywords and phrases. Google made its impact serving up the most relevant Web sites based on Page Rank. But Facebook’s Graph Search is built on the idea that you’re better served by finding content that’s been shared within Facebook. It’s your network of social connections, after all, and the philosophy is that you’d rather see things from that network. 
 
 The search paramaters are all about the stuff that circulates inside of Facebook — namely, content. Games, videos, pictures and people. Enter a phrase like, “games my friends play,” and you’ll get a list of content spit back out at you based on the connections that you’ve already made within Facebook. 
 
 Sound familiar? That’s because it is — Google is trying to do this exact same thing with Search Plus Your World. The way that Google+ works, if you or your friends +1 content on Google+, it’ll show up within your Google search results. The idea is, adding that social element into the mix makes users more apt to click on the content. 
 
 But Google’s problem is that Google+ isn’t as widely adopted or used as much as Facebook is. Facebook has the one-billion-strong network of users to suggest content to one another. 
 
 This also bodes ill for companies like Yelp, Foursquare and even the small startup Path, all of which aim to serve up recommendations to users based on their history of ratings, “Likes,” visits, etc. That’s problematic for these smaller companies, all of which work on vastly smaller data sets than Facebook’s gigantic network. 
 
 Looking for something that isn’t on Facebook? There’s an answer to that, too. Facebook has partnered with Microsoft’s Bing search engine to serve up any Web content that isn’t shared within the social network. Yet another slap in the face to Google there. 
 
 But ultimately that isn’t Facebook’s goal. Facebook wants to keep users inside Facebook to find things. The more stuff we share, use and look for inside of Facebook, the less often we’ll have to leave the network. 
 
 Good luck with that, Mark. ||||| Bloomberg News 
 
 Facebook is holding an event at 1 p.m. ET to unveil something new at its Menlo Park campus. 
 
 It issued an invitation for the mystery event last week, which offered no clues other than to say: “Come see what we’re building.” 
 
 This press conference could be held for any number of reasons — it could be some kind of new product launch or a redesign of a popular component of Facebook. Many tech pundits are reporting that it could be a new search feature. 
 
 WSJ reporter Evelyn Rusli will be reporting live from the event.
– Facebook held a major press event today, but kept the media guessing about what it would be unveiling. The answer was what Mark Zuckerberg described as the "third pillar" of Facebook: Graph Search. Basically, the idea is to allow people to search for people, places, and things to do through their networks, the official announcement explains. For example, if you were trying to set up a Game of Thrones viewing party, you might search for "friends in [your town] who like Game of Thrones." Going out? Search "movies my friends like." Dating? Search "friends of friends in [your town] who are single." The system will be "privacy aware," Zuckerberg said, so "you can only search for content that has been shared with you." It will also integrate Bing results, broadening the kind of information it can find—though at one point Zuckerberg added that he "would love to work with Google." The system is being rolled out as a limited beta release starting today. Right now, Zuckerberg says there are no plans to monetize the feature, though he said it "could potentially be a business over time." Some instant reactions: Farhad Manjoo: "This is the most natural-language search I've ever seen. It's a completely different paradigm from searching Google. Phrases, not keywords." Mike Isaac: "Google built web search first, then tried to slap Google+ on top of it for personalization. Facebook taking the backwards approach." (See more from Isaac here.) Henry Blodget: "I don't see how Facebook cashes in with this thing. Search could coin it for them. This, as executed, is just another feature." The stock market: Shortly after the rollout, Facebook's stock was down 2%, according to the Wall Street Journal.