Inside Facebook
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- Facebook Roundup: Voting Data, eBay, Drop.io, Narcissism, Hires and More
- Social-Focused Group Deal Provider Dealpair Offers Alternative to Facebook Deals
- Web Measurement Firms: Facebook Had Mixed Growth in August, September 2010
- Puma, Sonephone and More on This Week’s List of Emerging Facebook Apps
| Posted: 05 Nov 2010 08:00 PM PDT Inside Facebook extends a big thank you to our sponsors for supporting the continued growth of Inside Facebook. Check them out below!
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| Facebook Roundup: Voting Data, eBay, Drop.io, Narcissism, Hires and More Posted: 05 Nov 2010 06:53 PM PDT Facebook Election Data – Having already promoted an app that directed U.S. users to the polls for the election on Tuesday, the company provided a followup post analyzing the data it had gathered. In an intriguing correlation, candidates in Congressional races with more fans on their Pages also won their races around three-quarters of the time. The polling app, which allowed users to share the fact that they voted with friends, revealed that older people tended to vote relatively more, and more Republican, in this election. It also showed that people were more likely to indicated they voted if their friends had already shared that they had voted.
Permanent London Dev Garage – TechCrunch reported this week that Facebook is set to open a permanent East London office for its Developer Garage program. Drop.io Deal Involved Facebook Stock – All Things Digital reported that Facebook's recent acquisition of Drop.io — which we wrote about last week — left investors CFJ Gotham and RRE Venture with double the $10 million they'd invested in the past two years and that they were paid out of common stock. eBay Group Gifts Integrates Facebook – eBay's Group Gifts, which allows users to collectively purchase items, has integrated Facebook Connect into the process. Cablevision Integrates Facebook Photos – Cablevision is set to release a free multi-player game service in upcoming weeks, but also, a Facebook photo integration called IO Photos which will allow viewrs to see their Facebook photos on their televisions. Narcissistic Facebook Users Have Low Self-Esteem – A recent study has been able to use Facebook to predict a person's levels of narcissism and self-esteem. For example, narcissists and those with low self-esteem are more likely to spend more than an hour a day on Facebook and to post self-promotional photos. Narcissists are more likely to attract attention to themselves via status updates. More at the link.
Donate Your Status for Veterans – The Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America Page is doing an interesting promotion to give away a pair of Super Bowl tickets to one lucky veteran. You sign up to donate your status for Veterans Day and the state with the most people will award the tickets to a veteran. Pixorial Facebook Video Album – Pixorial is an interesting Facebook app that allows users to organize and share their Facebook videos.
Pepsi Launches Recycling Dream Machine – Pepsi has launched a Facebook application to try to get more people to recycle, help veterans with disabilities and give users some rewards. World Wildlife Fund Launches Gift Catalog – The World Wildlife Fund has launched a non-profit gift catalog on Facebook allowing users to donate and give gifts right on Facebook. Users can Share or Like these items and spread the word on Facebook.
Zuckerberg 'Awarded' Fear Medal – The twin rallies held last weekend in Washington, D.C. by comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert included "awards" the pair gave to public figures. Colbert jokingly awarded Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg one of the "fearies" for helping increase the public's sense of fear by making them afraid for their online privacy. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Social-Focused Group Deal Provider Dealpair Offers Alternative to Facebook Deals Posted: 05 Nov 2010 02:05 PM PDT
With Facebook launching its new Deals feature which is free for merchants and rewards users for checking in physical locations through Places, businesses will need to decide how to balance the different promotions to attain the highest return on investment.
Group deals have surged in popularity this year, with Facebook becoming a primary channel for deal distribution. Top group deals provider Groupon makes it easy to share with friends, while competitor Living Social rewards users if three of their friends also buy a deal, incentivizing sharing. Social marketing services company Wildfire created a group deals Page tab app, allowing Pages to run their own promotions. And now Facebook is offering a location-based promotion which spreads virally through the news feed when claimed and doesn’t force users to buy up front. Deals requires less additional advertising, and businesses don’t have to split revenues with Facebook like they do with Dealpair (who takes 10-20% of the deal price), Groupon (50%), and Living Social (30-50%). However, Facebook Deals doesn’t immediately bring in cash like third-party group deals. The promotions may settle into their own niches, though. Facebook Deals may prove more lucrative for businesses with wide appeal who are looking for exposure and repeat customers. Meanwhile, group deals may be better suited for big-ticket retailers looking to lock users into large purchases, and businesses seeking to discount extra inventory such as surpluses of a certain good, or low traffic during non-peak hours or days. Dealpair’s Differentation?Dealpair, for its part, is built on top of the Open Graph instead of merely tacking it on. Users log in through Facebook or simply give permissions to the Facebook app, reducing registration friction. When users find an interesting group deal, they only need to enter their credit card information to buy it. They can use a multi-friend selector to send friends application invites to view the group deal. The Facebook app also publishes a daily deal to the user’s stream, which could help users find people to buy and thereby lower the deal’s price. However, Dealpair isn’t explicit about it posting to a users stream every day, so some might consider this spammy.
After sufficient use of the app, Dealpair apparently begins increasing prominence of deals which match a user’s behavior. Dealpair is also running an incentivized referral program, where users get an entry into a drawing for an Apple TV for each five invites to the app that they send to friends. While this could be in violation of its promotions guidelines and developer policies, which prohibit incentivized use of Facebook’s communication channel, it should help the app to grow from the 352 MAU it has acquired since launching October 10th.
Despite its focus on social features, Dealpair may be too late to capitalize on the boom in interest in group deals. One way the app could differentiate itself would be by showing users deals that match their Likes and interests, for instance yoga gym memberships if they Like yoga, or beauty salon specials if they Like cosmetic brands. While significantly cheaper for businesses than other group deals, its lack of audience and the new types of promotions available will make it difficult for Dealpair and other followers to succeed. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Web Measurement Firms: Facebook Had Mixed Growth in August, September 2010 Posted: 05 Nov 2010 10:45 AM PDT Facebook brought in some more users late this past summer, at least according to some third-party web measurement firms. ComScore showed the company posting a gain of slightly more than 20 million new unique visitors worldwide between August and September to reach 620 million. The only other company that reports world stats is Google, and it showed flat traffic at 540 million over the same period. In the United States, there’s a similar diversity of data points — and in fact we’ve seen similar fits-and-starts growth patterns for the company in past months. Differences in tracking and counting methodologies account for some of the discrepancies in what the overall view shows. What’s most notable is that the overall trend continues to be up. Here’s a closer look. Facebook grew by nearly 3 million new monthly uniques to slightly less than 131 million, MySpace fell by around the same number to less than 60 million, and Twitter stayed even at around 28.3 million.
Facebook stayed pretty much flat, growing a few hundred thousand users to 148 million monthly uniques. Rival MySpace fell a couple million and Twitter stayed even flatter.
Worldwide showed stronger growth for Facebook and Twitter, but not for MySpace, which continued to fall.
While the search giant’s DoubleClick ad tool showed an unchanging worldwide monthly unique count, another count appeared to fall slightly — daily unique visitors went down towards 200 million.
Coming in slightly under comScore, the firm showed growth of around 2 million, to 135 million US uniques. Twitter, interestingly, shows an unusual blip in which it grew by 10 million new users over the course of August to end at 54.5 million.
Facebook Data The company self-reported US numbers growth of 4.42 million to 143 million monthly active users (a roughly equivalent measure to unique visitors), which you can read more about in our Inside Facebook Gold service. ConclusionSo, in sum, most services show Facebook gaining at least some new users in the US, while worldwide stats suggest overall growth. One explanation for the differences per month is that different firms count the same traffic for different months, which suggests we’ll see similar fits and starts in the autumn stats. Among Facebook’s closest product competitors, all firms show MySpace flat or falling, while some a couple show intriguing growth for Twitter. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Puma, Sonephone and More on This Week’s List of Emerging Facebook Apps Posted: 05 Nov 2010 08:06 AM PDT
If iHeart looks familiar, that’s because it’s an identical copy of iHearts, an older gift app with almost 15 million MAU. We’re not sure yet if iHearts was ripped off, or if the developer, Mmkay, decided for some reason to launch a second copy. ๑۩۞۩๑ HAPPY HALLOWEEN ! ๑۩۞۩๑, meanwhile, just looks like it’s growing. Most people, depending on how much they drank, realize that Halloween is now over — so Happy Halloween’s userbase has already more or less evaporated. Puma – buď kreativní a vyhraj is actually a shoe design app by the brand Puma, but in Czech. The unusual language choice isn’t keeping the app from growing. As you can see below, it looks pretty good, although not all the tools seem to be working. (The graffiti brush works fine, at least.)
Pogo Games is an Electronic Arts that has moved onto Facebook, offering arcade and word games like Scrabble; after a long period of slow growth, it has finally taken off. We’ll cover the other games this morning over on Inside Social Games. We’ll pick out two more that are particularly interesting. The first, SONEPHONE, is about to cross a million users; think of it as the Facebook version of Skype. And at the very bottom of the list is People Roulette, the latest Facebook take on Chatroulette. We’ve seen several of these come and go, but this one is growing particularly fast, at least for now. |
Google Developer Rasmussen to Facebook – TechCrunch 
DealPair is a 
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