Inside Facebook
Inside Facebook |
- Facebook Roundup: Zynga, Lawsuits, Chrome, Taxes, Glitches, Campaigns, Kids and the Navy
- Apple’s iPhoto ’11 Includes Sharing and Privacy Integrations with Facebook
- Facebook Prompts Users with Few Likes to Add More Pages
- With Its Facebook Marketing Business Growing, Buddy Media Raises $23 Million to Fund Expansion
- Profile Analyzers Feature Strongly on This Week’s List of Emerging Facebook Apps
| Facebook Roundup: Zynga, Lawsuits, Chrome, Taxes, Glitches, Campaigns, Kids and the Navy Posted: 22 Oct 2010 06:04 PM PDT Followup on the Story About Public Information Being Leaked – The Wall Street Journal discovered in an investigation that Facebook applications were inadvertently leaking URLs to third-parties that included user identification numbers. The story was overhyped, considering that the data was already publicly accessible, but some members of Congress are interested now, and so are class-action attorneys. The Journal has since faced criticism about withholding a similar story about another News Corp. property, MySpace — following that, it published the story on Friday afternoon. Facebook Hires Another Chrome Engineer — Facebook hired another Chrome OS developer from Google this week, David Garcia. In June Facebook also hired another Chrome engineer, Matt Papakipos. What might Facebook be doing with all these Chrome employees — building its own browser, perhaps? Like Google and Eveyrone Else, Facebook Also Using Tax Loopholes — Bloomberg had an interesting article detailing how Google and Facebook are using tax loopholes to save money, similar to nearly every other large company in the Energy Saving Strategies At Facebook’s Data Center – Last week we wrote about Facebook’s energy saving efforts at its Santa Clara, Calif. data center. This week Facebook's Engineering team shares many more details. Facebook's Summer of Code Projects – Facebook Engineering wrote a note this week about the company's participation in Google's Summer of Code this year. The event involves students spending a summer coding for an open source or free project; Facebook invited a few students to work on projects related to HBase, HipHop for PHP, Scribe, Three20 and XHP. More at the link.
Social Media Poll Shows Teens Are Safe – Web privacy firm Truste conducted a survey of 2,000 teens and parents asking them about privacy and social networking. Turns out most teens are "doing the right things" and parents are monitoring them. U.S. Navy Posts Social Media Handbook – The U.S. Navy Command posted an interesting handbook on its SlideShare account this week: the official Social Media Handbook.
Facebook Updates Mobile Capabilities – The Facebook Engineering team wrote a note this week about its efforts to update its mobile capabilities. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Apple’s iPhoto ’11 Includes Sharing and Privacy Integrations with Facebook Posted: 22 Oct 2010 04:37 PM PDT Apple's recently launched iLife '11 software suite includes new integrations between iPhoto, iMovie, and Facebook. It's now easier to share photos albums and videos directly to Facebook. Users can also see Likes and comments on those photos within iPhoto, choose basic privacy settings for photos, or post them to the walls of friends. However, the new iPhoto appears to be incompatible with the existing Facebook Exporter for iPhoto plugin.
Despite Facebook and Apple's iTunes being unable to put together an integration in time for the launch of Apple's music social network Ping, Facebook CTO Bret Taylor says a partnership is in the works. The enhancements to iLife show that Apple understands the value of Facebook integrations to its users. To share photos to Facebook in the new iPhoto '11, users simply highlight the photos, click "Share" at the bottom of the screen, and select Facebook from among other choices including email and Flickr. Users don't have to create a new album, and can instead choose to post to their wall, the wall of a friend, or make the photo their profile picture.
Regardless of whether an album was posted to Facebook through iPhoto, users will see all of their Facebook albums in a special section of the iPhoto album view, alongside collections from Flickr or Mobile me. Lastly, iMovie '11 include an option for posting videos directly to Facebook, as well as Vimeo and YouTube. Facebook has been revamping its own photos product, allowing high-resolution uploads and downloads, a special viewing mode, and drag-and-drop photo and album reordering. As both Facebook photos and iPhoto improve their native interfaces and become more popular, we'll see whether future integrations take the form of software updates, official plugins, or third-party solutions. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Facebook Prompts Users with Few Likes to Add More Pages Posted: 22 Oct 2010 11:36 AM PDT Facebook is running a prompt on the profiles of users with few Likes encouraging them to add more Pages. Page updates can fill out a user's news feed, keeping them engaged with Facebook until they accumulate more friends and are socially tied to the site.
Facebook recently launched a Page discovery tool called Page Browser, made new Likes of friends generate rich feed stories, and began showing your Likes in common with friends in hopes of getting users to connect to more official entities. The prompt explains that visiting Pages lets you "see what people are saying about things that matter to you, and discover the people who share these connections with you." A link in the prompt leads you to edit your profile, but oddly brings you to the "Basic Information" and not the "Likes and Interests" section. Facebook's viral nature brings in new users, but until they connect with friends and Pages, the value of using the service is less clear. These users are also the least familiar with the service. By giving them simple instructions for how to enrich their experience, Facebook can mature them into long-term, heavily engaged users — and use the additional Likes and Interests information to charge advertisers more to target them. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| With Its Facebook Marketing Business Growing, Buddy Media Raises $23 Million to Fund Expansion Posted: 22 Oct 2010 11:21 AM PDT
Based in New York City, it has grown its brand and agency client list from 100 to 300 companies, including seven of the 10 largest marketers and “a lot of the top 100,” chief executive Mike Lazerow tells us. It has been increasing its headcount to match, from 30 last year to around 100 today across its sales and development operations. Buddy Media provides tools for managing pages, like comment moderation, applications for Page tabs, and analytics software, and intended for larger organizations with 10 or more Pages to manage. You often won’t see its branding on its products, but chances are you’ve used one — like its vitaminwater market survey game or its Mattel Hot Wheels interactive car customizing app. It has focused on providing a set of services that clients can select from for their own needs, while some competitors have focused more on custom work for clients, or other market segments, like small businesses. The overall market is still much smaller than social gaming on Facebook — we expect the US virtual goods market to bring in $1.6 billion this year — but some larger brands and are spending tens of millions on Facebook advertising and marketing, and Buddy is profitable, growing revenue 15% a month, and in position to catch future growth as more brands continue to increase spending. The new funding will go towards expanding its business on Facebook, including more development for clients looking to use the Graph API to build Facebook features more deeply into other sites and applications, and mobile applications. It is also looking to grow its Twitter and Youtube offerings. It is also looking for developers from the Bay Area, and Lazerow says he’ll pay the moving costs and first month’s rent for anyone they hire who goes to join at headquarters. Institutional Venture Partners led the round with existing investors Softbank Capital, Greycroft Partners and Bay Partners participating. Other Page management companies that have raised money in the last year include Wildfire, which raised a $4.04 million first round in late April and Involver, which raised an $8 million third round earlier this month. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Profile Analyzers Feature Strongly on This Week’s List of Emerging Facebook Apps Posted: 22 Oct 2010 08:35 AM PDT
Various non-game apps, including the profile stats apps mentioned in the title, follow:
Chi Ti Segue is in Italian, but it makes the same claim that many English-language apps have before it: that it can see who visits your profile. Facebook’s policies prohibit this ability, of course, but Segue can at least tell you who posts to your wall. There are other profile analyzers on the list. My Most Used Words and Most Mutual Friends both do fairly self-obvious things, except that Most Mutual Friends actually measures which books, music, shows and so forth are most popular among your social group, not which friends. Down at number 16, Your statistics claims to do all of it at once. Citizen Sports is an older title, but the sports entertainment app has just hit an all-time MAU high. Its previous high point was way back in March of 2009 (full historical data is limited to AppData Pro). Yahoo, the app’s owner, may be doing some seasonal advertising for it.
To get a rundown of the games, head over to Inside Social Games. The remaining non-game apps of interest this morning are My Photos, at number seven, which posts a daily photo with comment and share links; SONEPHONE, which is a bit like Skype for Facebook; and PANDORA Bracelet Designer, which allows you to design and share pricey bracelets. |
Shoutlet Launches Management Platform – 
Facebook All Over Campaign Season – Facebook has used by candidates more heavily than ever this electoral season and the company recently released a "
Unfortunately, users can't reply to comments or otherwise interact with Facebook photos through iPhoto. Users can choose whether to 
The most lucrative area for developers on the Facebook platform has been social gaming to date, but the companies that provide marketing products for businesses on Facebook have been telling us that they’re having a great year. Buddy Media is one of the larger ones, having established itself as a provider of Page management software to major brands. It’s now riding a new wave of brand marketing spending on Facebook, and it just raised $23 million third round of funding to help it expand.
| You are subscribed to email updates from Inside Facebook To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |