Inside Facebook
Inside Facebook |
- Facebook Tests “Find Friends Browser” for Discovering Real Life Friends
- Early PR Leader Brandee Barker to Depart Facebook
- RockMelt Offers Social Media Browser for Update and Notification Addicts
- Now Showing: Friends’ Photo Albums Module on the News Feed and More
- Phrases Tops 50 Million Users on This Week’s List of Fastest-Growing Facebook Apps by MAU
| Facebook Tests “Find Friends Browser” for Discovering Real Life Friends Posted: 08 Nov 2010 05:02 PM PST Facebook appears to be testing a Find Friends Browser feature as a new part of its tool for helping people connect with Facebook users they already know in real life. In it, users can select to view friend suggestions of people who share their same location, work, education provider, or who are friends with a specific friend of theirs. The Find Friends Browser makes it easy to find people you know, but haven’t necessarily contacted before through email, instant messenger, or another service from which Facebook imports contacts. Users could previously find which friends shared some of these attributes with them through filters on the search interface, or by going to the mutual friends section of another user’s profile, clicking see all, and selecting the “Browse” tab. However, the “Friends of…” and home town options are not available elsewhere, and the Find Friends Browser is specifically designed for adding new friends.
Helping new users find their real world friends is crucial to them graduating from a nearly empty news feed to being socially tied to Facebook for the long term. The company has been busy introducing features to make that process easier. In July, it promoted the Find Friends tool with prompts on the home page. The Find Friends Browser could also offset the potential reduction in friend finding capabilities resulting from Google no longer allowing Facebook to import Google Contacts. It is currently unclear how users can navigate to the Find Friends Browser, but those in the test group can access it at http://www.facebook.com/find-friends/browser/. There they’ll see inputs and drop-down menus for the various parameters through which they can find friends, including high school, college, employer, hometown, currency city. For instance, users can see people who have the same hometown that they currently list in their profile or that they’ve previously listed, or the user can type in another home town to search. This helps users find people from their childhood who they might not have talked to in years.
The last parameter is “Friends of…”, which shows suggestions of people who are friends with a specific friend of the Find Friends Browser user. This is especially useful for when you are away from home, form a close relationship with one person and friend them, but then want to send friend requests to others you met on the same vacation or business trip. The suggestions returned display how many friends you have in common, and the tool appears to use this number and other factors to rank results by relevance. When a user mouses over one of the suggestions, an “Add as friend” button appears, allowing them to quickly send multiple friend requests without leaving the browser.
You may be less likely to know Find Friends Browser suggestions than those based on imported records of people you’ve emailed or instant messaged with. However, being in the same high school class often provides more basis for real friendship than simply sharing a professional email exchange. In this way, the Find Friends Browser helps users find distant associates they might have otherwise forgotten. [Thanks to Diana Nogueira for the tip] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Early PR Leader Brandee Barker to Depart Facebook Posted: 08 Nov 2010 03:34 PM PST
While known among reporters for her “no comment” answers to questions, she also took extra time to build relationships with them and explain the company’s position in straightforward terms. After reflecting on her career while on maternity leave this year, she decided that she wants to focus more on early-stage companies. She’ll be leaving Facebook officially on December 10. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| RockMelt Offers Social Media Browser for Update and Notification Addicts Posted: 08 Nov 2010 12:55 PM PST RockMelt, a web browser designed for consuming social media and other frequently updated content, launched its beta yesterday. The browser keeps a count of fresh news feed content, persistently displays friends for quick contacting, and makes it easy to share webpages you’re viewing. The desktop application is still very similar to Google Chrome, though. Only those who are constantly bouncing between sites to check for new updates to their Facebook news feed, Twitter stream, or favorite blogs will find enough added value to switch to RockMelt.
Other companies like Wowd and Seesmic have attempted to build desktop Facebook clients but have failed to gain significant traction. RockMelt is a fast, full-featured browser built on Google’s open source browser project Chromium, and has a backing from heavyweights such as Netscape’s Marc Andressen and superangel Ron Conway. However, the less familiar interface and fears about how RockMelt could use its widespread access to user data could prevent it from finding an audience outside of social media professionals. Users with access to the beta log-in through Facebook and give RockMelt a long list of permissions before they’re able to start browsing. A user’s friends who are online are shown down the left rail of the browser, and each can be clicked to show and their recent Facebook activity and give feedback, and contact them through Facebook Chat, private message, or wall post. Favorite friends can be added to a preferred list available through a toggle switch. Incoming and outgoing images and videos appear in-line in Chat — one improvement over Facebook.
The right rail holds: a user’s feeds, such as their Facebook news feed, friend list feeds, wall, photos, or notifications; Twitter stream, @replies, or lists; and favorite websites or blogs. Gold counters denote how many new updates have been posted to each feed since it was last viewed, reducing the need to check for new posts to these feeds — a distraction which can decrease efficiency. Users don’t have the option to view Facebook’s Top News, and activity stories such as a friend Liking a Page are not shown.
The top of the RockMelt browser includes a typeahead search bar capable of locating a user’s friends and bookmarks. When a search for keywords is made, instead of immediately bringing up search results, users can tab through previews of the results which load quickly thanks to DNS prefetching. A share button allows users to instantly begin composing a Facebook or Twitter share of the page they’re currently viewing. One deficiency of RockMelt versus browsing Facebook directly is that users can’t edit the caption text of a share, preventing users from highlighting specific text from the shared site, or adding their own additional context.
RockMelt will need to have everything Facebook has and more to attract users away from Chrome or Firefox. Its lack of a Top News feed, customized sharing, activity stories, and features which can’t be replicated with proper bookmarks could together relegate RockMelt to only a small user base. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Now Showing: Friends’ Photo Albums Module on the News Feed and More Posted: 08 Nov 2010 09:07 AM PST
Facebook appears to be using the module to get users to click away from their home page and get deeper into the site’s other features. Some in-house app modules Facebook has tried in the last few months include Recent Checkins and Related Photos. The Friends’ Popular Places module was tested on the home page, and a Questions module now permanently resides in the center of the home pag right sidebar. Facebook also displays app specific modules such as Event Invitations while browsing Events, or Deals while browsing Places pages. Facebook’s rapid development, testing, and deprecation of these modules suggests the site is searching for the most effective ways of getting users to navigate across different in-house apps, which likely reduces exhaustion and increases time-on-site.
Users will now see the module while browsing the news feed, Photos, Groups, Events, Friends, Notes, and Applications. It seems that page real estate is being shifted away from People You May Know, an early sidebar module which is helpful for new users, but which provides less utility to veteran users who’ve already found most of their friends. Typically the module shows two sets of two photos, accompanied by the uploader’s and album’s names. However, when seen while browsing Applications, the module can show up to five sets. Clicking through the photos does not bring up the lightbox view which is designed to keep a user’s place within Facebook while they view photos, and instead navigates users to the old photo browser. This indicates that the goal of the module may be to give users a compelling transition to Photos instead of them leaving the site when they’re done using an in-house app. [Thanks to Eti Suruzon for the tip] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Phrases Tops 50 Million Users on This Week’s List of Fastest-Growing Facebook Apps by MAU Posted: 08 Nov 2010 08:30 AM PST
Here’s the list:
We’re not entirely sure why Phrases is offline in the United States, but it could be related to Facebook’s most recent privacy scandal; some sources allege that Phrases, like other apps, was selling user information. For now, the app is just loading a simple message: “Sorry, currently Phrases can’t be accessed from within the US. We’ve had to make this tough decision in spite of the support of our fans in the US. Currently we have no timeline for lifting this restriction. We’re really sorry!” It will take a month for the loss of its US users to cycle into Phrases’ MAU count, but it’s notable that the app has shed only a tiny percentage of its DAU, a number that responds much more quickly to changes. So it seems reasonable to assume that Phrases is drawing almost all of its numbers from Facebook’s nearly 400 million international users. By that measure, Phrases crosses the path of almost 15 percent of all international users.
The last point we’ll note about Phrases is that it’s now only 10 percent smaller than FarmVille, at least counting by MAU. SmileyCentral comes in second, but the rapidly-growing app may have also run into policy problems with Facebook — users are reporting that the downloadable toolbar is no longer working on the social network, and its DAU is, unlike Phrases, registering a sharp drop. Most of the remaining apps on the list continue growing as they have in past weeks. The one to take note of is BandPage by RootMusic, which has heated up significantly; the app should cross 10 million MAU this week. We last reviewed BandPage in August. |
One of the long-time voices helping to shape Facebook’s public image is 
Facebook is now showing a right sidebar module called “Friends’ Photo Albums” which displays photos uploaded by the friends a user interacts with most. However, unlike many of Facebook’s modules such as 
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