Inside Facebook
Inside Facebook |
- Facebook Adds “Unlike Page” Button to Page Stories
- Facebook Builds Its First App for a Foreign Market: A Job Search App in Japan
- Dallas Mavericks Use Ifeelgoods to Let Users Earn Facebook Credits for Following Twitter Accounts
- Top 25 Facebook Games for November 2010
- Friends’ Popular Places Module Reveals Check-In Trends to Facebook Users
- Facebook’s Latest Punishments Hit LOLapps, Other Developers
- Tag Your Friends in the Stands this World Series with MLB’s Facebook Integration
- Dress Up for Halloween on This Week’s List of Fastest-Growing Facebook Apps by MAU
| Facebook Adds “Unlike Page” Button to Page Stories Posted: 01 Nov 2010 06:15 PM PDT Facebook has made it dramatically easier to Unlike Pages. Upon removing a Page’s update or the activity story generated from Liking a Page from your news feed or wall, you are given the option to Unlike that Page.
Last week Facebook gave the option to remove, mute, or blacklist applications when removing their stories, and now a similar functionality is available on Page stories. This puts pressure on Pages to not send spammy, irrelevant, or too many updates. Sharing a Page currently produces a story on your wall showing a profile picture of that Page without heigh constraints, causing vertically oriented profile pictures to appear very large. Page shares also include the Page’s existing Like count. Facebook has recently made several changes in hopes of getting users to Like more Pages. It released a Page discovery Browser, began prompting those with few Likes to add more Pages, started showing the Likes users have in common, and made Liking a Page generate a rich feed story. By helping brands and businesses to score unpaid Likes, Facebook positions Pages as valuable marketing tools worth advertising for. Wielding the Unlike ButtonWhen users click the “x” next to a Page update or activity story about them Liking the Page, users will now see the option to “Unlike Page” on the remove confirmation pop-up. Previously, users had to visit a Page and find the tiny Unlike button at the bottom of the right side bar, or edit their profile to remove a Page. If a user clicks “Unlike Page” on a story about multiple Pages such as “[User Name] Likes San Francisco Giants and 3 other pages”, only the first Page named will be Unliked.
This new easier Unlike flow may significantly increase the rate at which active Pages lose Likes. Page admins will need to extra take care not to exhaust, bore, annoy, or offend their audience. Tall, Prominent Page Share Stories with Like CountsWhen you share a Page to your stream, aversion of its profile picture without height constraint is shown on your wall. This will aid in discovery of Pages with tall profile pictures by making their share stories more prominent. Facebook may fix this soon, though.
All Page Shares now include the Page’s category and existing Like count. For example, sharing baseball team the San Francisco Giants’ Page produces a story which states “Sports Team: 556,437 people like this.” The Like count will give users assurance when they are considering Liking popular Pages, but could dissuade them from Liking new or unpopular Pages. [Thanks to Eti Suruzon for the tip.] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Facebook Builds Its First App for a Foreign Market: A Job Search App in Japan Posted: 01 Nov 2010 05:03 PM PDT To capture the one of the last markets in the developed world where it isn’t winning, Facebook has started building custom apps to appeal to young Japanese users. Facebook’s engineers have built a special app that helps university students connect with each other and alumni as they hunt for jobs for after graduation. It’s the first app the company has built specifically for a foreign market, according to spokesperson Kumiko Hidaka. While that might not sound groundbreaking, the thing to keep in mind is that the job market in Japan is far more rigid than it is in the United States. Workers often stay with a single company for their entire career.
The job-hunting process in Japan is also very systematic. Called shukatsu, it can take more than a year starting during a student’s junior year of college. It’s very time-consuming — students have to attend introduction seminars at companies, visit their university’s career counseling centers, and fill out entry sheets to send to firms or recruitment sites. Then they have to go through formal examinations and interviews. If they are successful, they receive a naitei or informal job offer and attend a special company ceremony. Companies have a strong preference to hire students straight out of school, so there is a deep fear among students that if they don’t get a job offer upon graduation, they will not be able to break into a high-salaried career. On top of that, Japan’s job market is fragile following the country’s worst postwar recession. There are 55 job openings for every 100 candidates, according to Bloomberg News. In the app, Facebook users can swap information about the search process with others who are looking, find alumni that are already working for top choice companies and find friends or classmates who have already accepted offers. “What we’re trying to do in Japan and elsewhere is make sure we’re providing a really good experience and understanding that there are certain differences in the way people use our product,” Hidaka said.
Japan is one of the few developed markets left in the world where Facebook isn’t the leading social network. The company has 1.7 million users there, up from roughly 900,000 a year ago, according to our Inside Facebook Gold data. It lags domestic blogging network Mixi, which has 21 million registered users, and the U.S.’s Twitter, which has 18 million unique visitors every month to its web site. Facebook notably also just released the Mixi profile link, allowing users to sync content to the site from Facebook. It also lets Japanese mobile users sign into the site using QR codes and has been encouraging developers to internationalize their apps. Founder Mark Zuckerberg also mentioned Japan as one of the four key international markets the company is focusing on this year at a talk last month at Stanford University. At that talk, he stressed how he wanted Facebook to be a truly international company, not just an American one. “My view is that every country is pretty different. We'd want to be pretty culturally sensitive," he said. "I don't want Facebook to be an American company. I don't want it to be a company that spreads American values across the world." Facebook created its first official engineering office outside the U.S. in Japan and send a few of its strongest engineers to tweak its product for the local market. With this newest app, it seems as though Facebook is trying to replicate the strategy that made it successful in the U.S. by seeding the social network among young university students, who will spread it by word of mouth as they enter the workforce. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Dallas Mavericks Use Ifeelgoods to Let Users Earn Facebook Credits for Following Twitter Accounts Posted: 01 Nov 2010 04:42 PM PDT NBA team the Dallas Mavericks is running a promotion powered by micro-incentives platform Ifeelgoods offering 5 free Facebook Credits for following or retweeting the team’s Twitter account. The Facebook Credits Page posted about the contest, which lasts from November 1st until November 5th, when those who follow the team will be sent a direct message on Twitter containing the Credits.
The promotion appears to be the first publicly announced promotion powered by Facebook app2user program partner Ifeelgoods, which seeks to help companies reward users for making purchases, sharing with friends, clicking ads, signing up for email updates, and now following Twitter accounts. Since Credits are cheap to distribute and can be accumulated, they represent a low cost way to offer a compelling incentive for a call to action. Ifeelgoods appears to be running two parallel websites, leading the privacy and terms and conditions pages which are cited on the promotion page to be improperly linked to pages which doesn’t exist. NBA.com’s site vaguely states that the Credits “can only be used in connection with Ifeelgood’s Facebook application”, but the real terms and conditions page doesn’t make this clear. Other stipulations include that the Credits expire 14 days after being awarded, only the first 1000 retweets and 15,000 follows of @dallsmavs will qualify, and “Ifeelgoods and its merchant partners reserve the right to void or otherwise "take back" Facebook Credits that User received in connection with a merchant partner purchase that User later returned to the merchant partner.” This last stipulation could possibly be used to strip Credits from those who delete their retweet or soon unfollow @dallasmavs.
If the promotion succeeds, many other companies may seek to begin offering micro-incentives. By closely watching how these promotions are used and abused, Ifeelgoods will be able to develop best practices, protection against gaming of the system, and a suggested reward price list for different common calls-to-action. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Top 25 Facebook Games for November 2010 Posted: 01 Nov 2010 04:30 PM PDT
Though last month saw only moderate losses for the top Facebook games, this month has 18 of 25 applications losing significant numbers of monthly active users. The drop is not entirely unprecedented, as each year, starting around this time, the activity for social games tends to drop. Even so, the overall losses are significantly more than this time last year — perhaps in part because many of the games on the list are a year or more old. To counter these declines, many of the games on this list, especially the Zynga apps, have had boosts in advertising going as far back as this spring, but the new players don’t always stick around. For example, FarmVille saw minor growth last month, but has dropped over 5.6 million MAU this month. The handful of growing games are mostly either newer or experiencing fresh growth after long declines. The new games include Millionaire City and Car Town, the latter appearing for the first time with growth of over a million new MAU in the past month. There is, however, a boom among smaller developers, which we’ve covered in more detail here. > Continue reading on Inside Social Games. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Friends’ Popular Places Module Reveals Check-In Trends to Facebook Users Posted: 01 Nov 2010 12:23 PM PDT
Facebook is building out the Places product from a simple location service to include secondary features which were previously only available in third-party location services, or through Facebook apps such as PlacePop.
Meanwhile, apps like Context Optional’s Leaderboard and BetaPond’s Loyalty Builder offer check-in leaderboards with which businesses can run promotions. Now, with Facebook testing a check-in incentive system for businesses called Deals and this Friends’ Popular Places module, Facebook is potentially reducing the need for some of these third-party apps. At the top of the right sidebar while viewing photos, events or their news feed, users will see Places which have received check-ins from multiple friends. The module may factor proximity to the user into the algorithm which decides which Places to show, as we are only seeing local Places in the module. Users can click through a Place’s name to visit its Places page. There is no way for users seeking to learn of new Places which are popular with their friends to purposefully generate the module, and it may not be rolled out to all users yet. The new module signals that developers should be cautious about devoting resources to building simple, practical Places apps while the Places product is still under active augmentation. Facebook could create a native interface or in-house promotion system which could overshadow their apps. Sara Inés Calderón contributed to this article. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Facebook’s Latest Punishments Hit LOLapps, Other Developers Posted: 01 Nov 2010 08:51 AM PDT Last Friday, Facebook said that it would punish developers who sold information to third-party advertisers, part of the company’s most recent privacy issues set off by the Wall Street Journal. Facebook did not name which developers would be impacted, only saying that it would be under a dozen and “mostly small developers”. Over the weekend, we’ve looked at a number of apps on Facebook, and found that the suspensions — more on those in a moment — are potentially not limited to only small developers, with four of the companies possibly involved having over five million monthly active users. LOLapps, a company named several times in the WSJ’s articles, remains significantly affected. After having all of its apps removed by Facebook over the weekend preceding the WSJ’s first article, LOLapps appeared to be in the clear, having been reinstated after the article came out. But now it, appears to have been hit with a fresh penalty. It and the other developers involved will have to spend the next six months without any viral channels — no invitations, notifications, or wall posts. Here’s the error message that users will see:
Without these channels, growing apps on Facebook is going to be extremely challenging. A core value proposition of the Facebook platform is that it allows applications to integrate with Facebook’s social graph, and that’s no longer possible for these developers. Here’s a list of the largest companies we found to be potentially affected by the punishments:
Taken together, those developers account for almost 50 million monthly active users. We also found a few smaller developers that have been affected, like Manakki, which has about two million MAU. There’s one important caveat to the viral channel shutdowns: LOLapps appears to have had one app spared, its recently-released game Ravenwood Fair. We’re not certain why this app escaped suspension, when it appears that all other LOLapps games and apps have had their channels blocked (there are too many to test them all). But there are several possibilities. Ravenwood was released after LOLapps had its apps suspended the first time around, so it may have never been part of the data sharing problems that got LOLapps in trouble in the first place. Facebook may also be accounting for LOLapps’ transition from developing apps to games, since game developers appear to be a more valued presence on the platform. And Facebook may also be loathe to be seen destroying a small developer with bright prospects — with Ravenwood able to spread, LOLapps has one app to work with over the next six months that isn’t heavily constrained.
For now, none of this has been confirmed by the companies themselves — LOLapps has declined to comment, and Facebook did the same when we spoke with them about the suspensions on Friday. Facebook did say that it is open to working with developers to bring back affected applications in its blog post last week, though we’re not sure if that means Facebook will allow all of these restrictions to be lifted sooner than the originally stated six month period or not. Whatever the case, LOLapps’ approach to producing non-game apps, which it used to promote its games, appears to be at risk; CrowdStar still employs this strategy, however. CrowdStar, Zynga and other large developers named in the WSJ’s articles don’t appear to have been affected by the suspensions. Here’s another list, showing some of the large developers that Facebook has suspended from the platform this year:
Out of the above list, only BeatsGames created games — and even it also had several small non-game apps, like Friends Interview 3.0. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Tag Your Friends in the Stands this World Series with MLB’s Facebook Integration Posted: 01 Nov 2010 08:30 AM PDT As the World Series continues between the San Francisco Giants and the Texas Rangers, the Major League Baseball has recognized the power of Facebook in its fans' lives and created an opportunity for fans to tag themselves in a panoramic photo from recent games at AT&T Park in San Francisco, Calif. The tagging works with Facebook Connect.
Using the feature, called Postseason 2010 Tagoramic, users will see a composite image on the MLB web site, which is made from 280 total photos, 28 across and 10 down, taken over a period of 17 minutes during recent games. By dragging a red flag to one of the people in the photo, you can then select which Facebook friend you want to tag and do so. A notice that you tagged them in the MLB photo appears on their profile. It’s a slick way of making game-watching more social, even if the tagged person didn’t actually have tickets to the game (as in the case below).
Overall, baseball has gained a solid number of fans on Facebook. 12 million people Like the Major League Baseball (MLB) or one of its 30 teams on Facebook. Incidentally, the Giants win 554,000 Likes to the Rangers' 348,000. Check the app out out here and here. For more information about ways to innovate your Facebook presence, check out the Inside Facebook Marketing Bible. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Dress Up for Halloween on This Week’s List of Fastest-Growing Facebook Apps by MAU Posted: 01 Nov 2010 07:40 AM PDT
During the recent scandal over the sharing of user IDs with third party advertisers on Facebook, Phrases was temporarily unavailable. Now it’s again displaying a simple message: “Phrases is unavailable.” This message doesn’t match previous app suspensions we’ve seen from Facebook. For now, we’re not sure whether Phrases is running afoul of Facebook policy enforcement, or is simply having technical problems. Here’s the full list:
Disfrázate, in Spanish, translates to “dress up”. The app has shot up over the past week, probably because of Halloween. Here’s what it looks like:
Next up, SmileyCentral is doing quite well with a plug-in that displays smileys in place of emoticons on Facebook. That’s followed by The Autism Spectrum Quotient Test, which is a bit like the Myers Briggs tests that litter Facebook and the broader web in essentially being a free version of a professional psychological test. RockYou! is on its way back up, led by Birthday Cards, which once had almost 50 million MAU. Moving down, the list gets into the games — My Kingdom, Ravenwood Fair and Crime City are all new titles from small developers, doing quite well. For more on them, head over our Inside Social Games top 20 list. |
Facebook is now showing users a Friends’ Popular Places module while they are viewing their news feed or other areas of the site. The module shows Places where many of your friends have checked in, helping users discover Places that they too might be interested in visiting.
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