Yahoo files more patent claims against Facebook - Yahoo today filed two more advertising-related patent infringement claims against Facebook. Yahoo criticized the social network for purchasing patents specifically as means of retaliation against Yahoo. Facebook responded with the following statement, ”We remain puzzled by Yahoo’s erratic actions. We disagree with these latest claims and we will continue to defend ourselves vigorously.”

Instagram acquisition may delay IPO - Reuters reports that Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram and recent patent purchases may delay its IPO by about a week, pushing the initial public offering to later in May.

New Facebook for Windows Phone App - The new Facebook app for Windows phones includes features such as full thread messaging, the option to tag friends at locations, delete posts and comments, and ability to Like comments.

Facebook focuses on security - Facebook is testing a new product called Support Dashboard, which gives people who use Facebook more insight and visibility into what happens after they report content or other users on the site. From the Support Dashboard, users can see if their report has been reviewed by Facebook and receive an alert when a decision has been made about a report.

Facebook added mobile and data center jobs, among others to its Careers page this week. Interestingly, the company is looking for two mobile app analysts — one to analyze Facebook’s iOS app and another for Android.

On LinkedIn, Facebook posted positions for various legal positions, as well as other account staff.

Posts added this week on Facebook’s Careers Page:

• Mobile Apps Analyst
• Data Center Infrastructure Delivery Supervisor (Lulea)
• Lead, Custom Market Insights (New York)
• Partner Engineer, Marketing Solutions (Sao Paulo)
• Client Partner Hamburg
• Technology Partner, Hyperion
• Associate, Business Operations, Mid-Market Sales
• Law Enforcement Response Team Lead
• Entity Quality Rater – Contract

Jobs posted by Facebook on LinkedIn:

• Corporate Paralegal
• Lead Counsel, Network Infrastructure
• Compensation Consultant
• Language Specialist, Brazilian Portuguese
• Client Partner, Korea (Singapore)
• Platform Product Marketing Manager
• Platform Marketing Events Manager
• Platform Developer Marketing Manager
• SEM Analyst
• Client Partner, Sales Executive German (Dublin)

Who else is hiring? The Inside Network Job Board presents a survey of current openings at leading companies in the industry.

Facebook today announced that native Android apps will now be able to benefit from the same social discovery channels as web apps and native iOS apps that integrate with the social network.

Previously native Android apps that used Facebook login couldn’t get distribution through mobile News Feed, Timeline, bookmarks and requests. These channels have been available to HTML5 and iOS apps since October 2011; in February, Facebook told us that 60 million monthly active users navigated to mobile apps from the social network. Apps like Pinterest, BranchOut, Diamond Dash and Words With Friends are among those that have seen millions of additional monthly visits by incorporating Facebook single sign-on. As part of the latest update to Facebook for Android, native Android apps can now access the same features.

Android developers who currently use single sign-on can visit their app settings to enable deep linking. After that, the native app will open when users tap on Facebook stories or requests within Facebook. For example, Spotify users will be able to instantly play songs from their Android devices when they tap on a friend’s listening activity (see example right). If users don’t have the native app installed, they will be taken to a download page.

Apps that integrate Open Graph, in addition to single-sign on, have additional opportunities for discovery on mobile. Facebook recently added game stories in News Feed as a way for users to discover apps on their mobile devices, and a new “trending articles” module gives additional traffic to social readers on the web and mobile devices. We’ve also seen expanded activity modules on mobile Timeline this week.

Developers will be able to get insights about the distribution of referral traffic from the mobile feed, versus mobile search, bookmarks, notifications and Timeline. This was first introduced in March.

More details about deep linking for native Android apps is available on the Facebook Developers site here.

Facebook released an update for its Android app on Friday that includes additional messaging features and a shortcut to encourage users to take and post photos with Facebook.

After downloading Facebook for Android 1.9, users will have two new icons on their homescreen — Messenger and Camera — in addition to the icon for the main app. This seems to be a strategic move by Facebook to maintain relevance on Android. By owning the mobile operating system, Google can integrate its Google+ social networking features into users’ phones in direct ways Facebook can’t. For example, photos and videos from an Android phone are automatically uploaded to a user’s private album on Google+.

Facebook, which thrives on photo sharing, has responded with a camera shortcut. With one tap, Android users will be able to pull up Facebook’s camera feature to take a photo or video to share with friends on the site. After capturing a moment, users tag their friends and location, in addition to adding a caption and managing privacy settings.

The updated app also includes a shortcut to Facebook’s messaging and chat features, again as a way to capture users who might otherwise turn to Google-owned apps for conversations. Facebook already offers a standalone app called Messenger, but now Android users will have an additional Messenger icon on their homescreen, also known as the app tray. The latest improvements to Facebook’s native messages product make the standalone app redundant. Group messages, location-sharing, online status and having contacts sorted by frequency of interaction are all features once exclusive to Messenger that are now part of the general Facebook app. The social network might decide to discontinue development of the standalone Messenger for Android and focus on the main app.

Android users can download the Facebook app, which also includes a number of bug fixes and faster performance, from Google Play.

Images from Facebook.

Facebook recently updated its feature phones mobile app to allow users to interact with pages and check into locations, according to posts on the company’s Facebook for Every Phone page.

“Facebook for Every Phone” is a native mobile app compatible with more than 3,600 different Java-enabled feature phones. Previously, the app included the ability to upload photos, read News Feed, view profiles, check messages, see event invites and take other basic actions with your friends, but it did not support fan pages or check-ins.

Now these users can Like pages, view their friends’ Likes and see posts from pages they Like in their mobile News Feed. They can also share check-ins along with a status. Users cannot yet share photos with location information or tag other users in a check-in. Still, these are powerful features for a large demographic of users who do not have smartphones or — as is the case for many users in developing countries — personal computers.

As of Dec. 31, 2011, Facebook for Every Phone had 39.7 million monthly active users, according to AppData. Facebook no longer provides daily or monthly usage data about its native apps, but it’s worth noting that the Facebook for Every Phone fan page has more than 75.9 million Likes. Users are given the option to Like the page when they first log-in using the app, a company spokesperson tells us. Despite only being launched on Jan. 20, Facebook for Every Phone is now the most-Liked page on the site, beating out the general Facebook fan page and pages of popular celebrities, according to our PageData service.

It’s important for Facebook to continue to improve its offerings for feature phones and the mobile web, not just iOS and Android apps. As the social network grows in markets like India and Africa, where users are primarily accessing the site through feature phones, the company needs to continue to offer new features as it has done to increase engagement among desktop and smartphone users. Pages and location sharing are ways for users to interact with entities besides friends. These features are also related to monetization, since they allow Facebook to collect additional data about users’ interests and offline behavior so that it can deliver relevant ads to them in the future.

Facebook initially overhauled its app for feature phones in January 2011, in partnership with Snaptu. It then acquired the Israeli startup three months later and rebranded the feature phone app as Facebook for Every Phone in July 2011. The app included new features, and Facebook made deals with carriers to offer users 90 days of free data access. The app was designed to require less data transfer than mobile sites or Java apps, so low costs likely encouraged users to pay for access after the free trial expired.

Facebook has acquired the team and most of the assets of Tagtile, a mobile-based customer loyalty management startup, according to a post on Tagtile’s website.

Facebook started and ended this week with mobile-focused acquisitions, having bought photo-sharing app Instagram for $1 billion on Monday. The price for Tagtile was undisclosed.

“We’re happy to confirm that Tagtile’s founders are joining Facebook, and that Facebook is acquiring substantially all of the company’s assets,” Facebook said in a statement. “We’ve admired the engineering team’s efforts for some time now and we’re excited to have them join Facebook.”

According to Tagtile’s website, its service “helps local businesses identify and engage their customers to increase revenue.”

The product includes a hardware device, the Tagtile Cube, that merchants place at their checkout counter. When customers make a purchase in-store, they tap their smartphone against the Tagtile Cube and earn rewards. Merchants can access data from the Cub online, and use the information to target messages back to their customers. Tagtile will continue its current operations for now, but the company won’t be taking on any new customers. “Tagtile as it exists today won’t be part of what we do at Facebook,” the post says.

This is similar to other acquisitions Facebook has done primarily for talent rather than a product or service. The company’s most recent acqui-hire was location-based service Gowalla that was shut down about three months after being bought by the social network. Instagram, on the other hand, is set to remain in operation under the Instagram name.

Facebook is clearly trying to establish a strong base of mobile-minded talent to improve its positioning in that space. Facebook had 432 million mobile monthly active users as of Dec. 31, 2011, and just over 13 percent of these users accessed the social network exclusively through mobile devices.

Joining Facebook through the acquisition are co-founders Abheek Anand and Soham Mazumdar. Anand previously worked in product management and Engine Yard and as an investor at Lightspeed Venture Partners. Mazumdar was an early engineering lead who worked on infrastructure and data mining for Google Search.

We will continue to update this post as more information becomes available.

Facebook acquired mobile photo sharing application Instagram and its team for about $1 billion in cash and Facebook stock, according to a press release.

The transaction, which is subject to customary closing conditions, is expected to close later this quarter. The acquisition is likely to drive Facebook’s valuation even higher when the company goes public, as it is expected to later this spring. Instagram was previously valued at $500 million when it raised $50 million in a series B round led by Sequoia Capital that closed just before the Facebook acquisition, according to TechCrunch.

The app will continue under the Instagram name and continue to support posting services beyond Facebook. Users can continue to have followers and follow people without connecting with them directly on Facebook

“Millions of people around the world love the Instagram app and the brand associated with it, and our goal is to help spread this app and brand to even more people,” Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post.

In the past, Facebook has bought companies for talent and either shut down their services or incorporated them into Facebook. Gowalla, for instance, closed its location-based service last month. Group messaging app Beluga became Facebook Messenger.

Zuckerberg noted that this is the social network’s highest profile acquisition, and said that the company does not expect to make others like this in the near future, perhaps to prevent speculation on whether Facebook would buy Pinterest.

“This is an important milestone for Facebook because it’s the first time we’ve ever acquired a product and company with so many users,” Zuckerberg wrote. “We don’t plan on doing many more of these, if any at all. But providing the best photo sharing experience is one reason why so many people love Facebook and we knew it would be worth bringing these two companies together.”

In July 2011, we suspected that Facebook would release an Instagram competitor when leaked images of a Facebook mobile photo sharing app were discovered. The project never materialized. There were rumored reports of Facebook trying to buy Instagram several times over the past 18 months. Google apparently had talked to Instagram as well. It seems Facebook finally sealed the deal when it offered the mobile photo sharing company twice as much as it had been valued at previously.

We will update this post with more information as it becomes available.

Exclusive: Facebook helps Instagram with unique Open Graph app rollout

Facebook has open sourced Ringmark, its browser test suite for building apps on the mobile web, according to a post on the company’s HTML5 blog today.

The effort is part of Facebook’s push to promote HTML5 development. One of the major challenges with HTML5 development right now is fragmentation in mobile browser capabilities, but Ringmark lets developers see instantly whether their apps will be able to run on a given mobile browser.

The social network has an interest in helping HTML5 become a more viable platform for developers to build upon since it cannot monetize native iOS or Android apps. Many developers see HTML5 as inferior to native mobile experiences, but as HTML5 improves, there is more likelihood that developers will adopt it and then Facebook can benefit from the use of Credits in these apps.

Promoting HTML5 is also Facebook’s way of supporting a potential new wave of mobile development.

“For those that are building with the web today, it’s a major hurdle to learn native technologies like Objective-C and Java,” Facebook engineer Matt Kelly wrote in the blog post announcing the news. “We hope that an improved mobile web can unlock a large contingency of developers that could, and will, be developing for mobile.”

When the company introduced Ringmark at Mobile World Congress in February, there were more than 400 tests available. Now that the project is open sourced, any developer can contribute tests and provide value for others in the community. The company hopes that over time this will help mobile browser vendors build browsers that better serve developer needs and bring better apps and games to consumers.

“This is the beginning of a process, starting with open sourcing the tests,” Kelly wrote. “As we continue to build, we’ll continue to open source even more of this work.”

Facebook also says it will soon contribute Ringmark tests to the Core Mobile Web Platform Community Group in the W3C. The group is an industry-wide consortium including manufacturers, carriers and developers that aim to push HTML5 forward with a single set of standards.

Developers can view and contribute to the Ringmark code here and here. The test suite can be found here.

Facebook added a mobile referrals dashboard so developers can track and analyze traffic from mobile devices, the company announced in a blog post Friday.

Developers can now view mobile app clicks by day, device and source. The insights also provide mobile referral data by age, gender, language and country. This real-time information can help developers understand their audience and how Facebook’s mobile platform is or isn’t helping them get distribution for their apps. The device and demographic data is also likely to help developers’ marketing efforts and allow them make more informed decisions about the direction of their product.

Facebook recently added game stories in News Feed as a way for users to discover apps on their mobile devices. Developers can now see the distribution of referral traffic from the mobile feed, versus mobile search, bookmarks, notifications and Timeline. This might allow developers to better understand Facebook’s mobile platform and decide which discovery channels to emphasize. It might also highlight areas that Facebook needs to improve in order to provide enough value to mobile developers.

The new insights are available for all apps that integrate Facebook, including native iOS and web applications. They can be accessed from the “Mobile” tab underneath “Traffic” in the app insights dashboard.

Facebook updated the mobile version of News Feed this weekend so users can like and comment on posts with one tap instead of two.

Previously, users of Facebook’s iOS app, Android app and mobile touch site had to tap a “+” button that would bring up the like and comment options. Now the features are directly under each post, making interaction faster and easier.

Since the social network pulls News Feed from m.facebook.com into its native applications, changes like this can be made without requiring users to download a new version of the app.

Still absent from the mobile feed is the “share” button allowing users to repost content from their friends or pages. Sharing on the desktop version of the site has taken off since Facebook enlarged image thumbnails and began displaying the total number of shares, but users have not been able to take this action from their mobile devices.