Inside Facebook
Inside Facebook |
- Facebook Roundup: Advertising, Privacy Legislation, Places, The Queen and More
- University of Illinois’ Augmented Reality Drawing App Wins Facebook’s Camp Hackathon Competition
- Gmail Creator Paul Buchheit Leaves Facebook to Join Y Combinator
- Will Facebook Employees Get a Shorter Email Domain, or Will Users?
- More New Games Top This Week’s List of Emerging Facebook Apps
| Facebook Roundup: Advertising, Privacy Legislation, Places, The Queen and More Posted: 12 Nov 2010 06:28 PM PST
Obama to Move Online Privacy Legislation – The Wall Street Journal reports that the Obama administration is set to call for the creation of laws, a new governmental watchdog position, a task force and other initiatives to police online privacy and companies like Facebook. Facebook, Congress and Privacy – We recently wrote an extensive piece about whether the U.S. Congress would act on privacy legislation concerning companies like Facebook. In a C-Span interview, the would-be chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) says he would be willing to legislate on privacy and wants Facebook representatives to testify on the same issue. Firing Over Facebook Update – The National Labor Relations Board in the U.S. filed a complaint against a company for firing an employee after she complained about her boss on Facebook. The bigger point is that this case might give broader protections to what employees can say about their jobs on Facebook.
ConnectU Loses Case – ConnectU wanted to stay its $65 million award from Facebook while it challenged the settlement, but, a New York state judge confirmed a $13 million payment ConnectU owed to its law firm, Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan LLP, effectively ending that effort.
BraveNewTalent Connects, Protects Facebook Users – BraveNewTalent recently launched a Facebook app to help users find jobs, but the app also protects users' privacy. The app only allows employers on Facebook to see education, work history and current employer, not their photos or other information. Backupify Announces Backup for Facebook Pages – Backupify, a provider of online backup, just released a backup/archive product for Facebook Fan Pages that includes data from News Feeds, Wall posts, photo albums and messages. Divorce Lawyers Like Facebook – Facebook has become the primary source for compromising information in divorce cases, according to a recent survey of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers. Particularly pertinent information includes "contradictions to previously made statements and promises."
LivingSocial Launches Escapes – As we previously reported, LivingSocial acquired Urban Escapes trip planning last month. This week LivingSocial announced its new curated travel experiences service, LivingSocial Escapes, according to a press release. In October CEO Tim O'Shaughnessy told us the companies would initially work together, and then, grow trips into LivingSocial's existing markets. Context Optional Releases Open Apps – Context Optional announced the release of an addition to its enterprise-level social marketing suite that now includes Open Apps, which allows users to create and implement social apps on any web site, according to a press release. Life As Told By Facebook - An interesting and short video playing the life of a twentysomething man as he goes through a series of relationships, gets married, has children and ages as told by his Facebook Wall. British Monarchy On Facebook – The British Monarchy launched a Facebook Page earlier this week, it's grown to 232,000 Likes, includes photos, video and other information, and fans have already started trashing the family on the Wall. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| University of Illinois’ Augmented Reality Drawing App Wins Facebook’s Camp Hackathon Competition Posted: 12 Nov 2010 04:04 PM PST Facebook hosted the finals of its Camp Hackathon competition last night through today, featuring a face-off between winners of smaller hackathons on five college campuses. Young developers came to Facebook headquarters to create new applications in one night, where they would be judged by Facebook leaders including vice president of engineering Mike Schroepfer, director of design Kate Aronowitz and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg.
Facebook engineers were on hand through the night helping teams surmount development obstacles. Each team was also mentored by an alum from their school who is now an engineer for Facebook. The event was more casual than most at Facebook. Paul Tarjan, leader of the Camp Hackathon project, unicycled into the conference hall to start the prototype forum. The teams were surprisingly candid in their five minute presentations, discussing the development process, bugs, and things they couldn’t figure out how to build.
Here are the five teams, and what they created: University of Texas, Austin – Fancy Checkin StuffThe app allows users to check in to mark their territory, and view a map of which areas of their town they control. The creators explained that the game was designed to “compel you to socialize and meet your neighbors while wandering your town.” University of California, Berkeley – Foto InquestA Facebook Photos search engine which allows users to search for photos by tags, and watch a slideshow of photos returned. Photos with more people tagged are displayed for longer, making the slideshow personalized based on the actions of your social network Georgia Tech – FbMarksA bookmarking system where you can bookmark any wall or news feed story. A bookmarking star appears next to each story which users can click to add that story to their bookmarks which can be accessed through a tab on Facebook’s top navigation bar. Bookmarks can be arranged into a playlist, allowing users to watch all their bookmarked videos or listen to all their bookmarked songs, turning Facebook into a passive content consumption channel. The app brings the favorites functionality of Twitter to Facebook, making it easy to return to content you don’t have time to experience when first discovered. University of Illinois – AirChalkAn augmented reality app where users can use their phone to draw on a display, similar to a virtual white board. A phone’s camera can track a wand for drawing, or the phone itself can be used to control the cursor. Multiple users can collaborate and draw on the same canvas. While an interesting idea with great potential as mobile phone image recognition and accelerometer technology improves, the only Facebook integration is a Like button on the app’s home page. University of Wisconsin, Madison – CacophonyA top-down music shooter which turns different sounds into targets the user can shoot. The 80′s-graphic engine style generates polygon targets and sets trajectories based on tempo and the music’s wave form. The Facebook integration allows users to compare high scores with friends. This independent game could become a compelling, shooter version of Guitar Hero with some polish. Overall, we see FbMarks as the most universally useful application. We’ll update in a minute once the winner has been selected. And The Winner Is…Despite only a minimal Facebook integration, University of Illinois’ AirChalk won the Facebook Camp Hackathon. Mark Zuckerberg said that team members Islam and Hani Sharabash had an “interesting vision of how the app could be used in the future, though since there is the option to collaboratively draw, I thought you’d allow users to invite their friends.”
Still, the team’s app was the most ambitious of the entrants, and Facebook rewarded the two brothers with not only the official prize of $500 Amazon gift certificates, but a summer internship at Facebook. The Sharabashs cried out in joy upon hearing they’d get to spend more time with the company. When asked how it was getting help on their app from Facebook’s engineers, Hani said “They’re like the brightest people in their field, they’re very social, awesome personalities. Tarjan was so down to earth. He folded up our paper tracker so we could have more time to code. The environment here is just awesome.” The team hopes to release their application publicly, and “ask people how they want to use it.” Facebook’s Tarjan said that one of the best parts of watching the young teams during the development process is the “amazing ability to get feedback on the product…watching their pain points makes my role [on the Platform team] easier.” Of the university Hackathon program, he said “it’s a great recruiting tool and a great branding tool as well. I want students to think Facebook is THE cool place to work.” As for the future of apps created during the Hackathon, “the app is not the goal, the experience and the learning is the goal.” Users interested in watching the presentation and judging of the hacks can check out the stream via Facebook Live. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Gmail Creator Paul Buchheit Leaves Facebook to Join Y Combinator Posted: 12 Nov 2010 11:40 AM PST
Buchheit joined Facebook in August of last year when the social network acquired his social sharing service FriendFeed. Buchheit confirmed publicly that he was leaving the company on his FriendFeed page. “It has less to do with Facebook and more to do with me,” Buchheit wrote. “I’m just more excited about helping new entrepreneurs create the next Facebook or Google.” He also leaves shortly after Facebook initiated a partnership with YCombinator to provide technical and design resources to new social startups. Facebook said in a statement: “We support Paul Buchheit's decision to pursue his passion and advise start-ups full-time. While he'll be missed at Facebook, Paul has already established himself as a respected angel investor and we hope his insights will be helpful to the next generation of Silicon Valley start-ups.” Facebook typically acquires small companies purely for talent, instead of for their products. As Buchheit leaves, his original Friendfeed co-founder Bret Taylor has moved on to take a high-profile role within Facebook as the company’s chief technology officer. At least a quarter of FriendFeed’s original employees have left since the company was bought for a reported $50 million last year. Kevin Fox stayed at Facebook for 10 months before leaving and eventually joining Mozilla Labs as principal user experience designer. Another employee Ben Darnell left three months after the acquisition to join Brizzly, which was later bought by AOL. Buchheit is a much higher-profile departure because of his Google background, because he’s a thought leader in Silicon Valley and an active angel investor. He also leaves as Facebook is possibly preparing to launch its own e-mail service next week in San Francisco. While at Facebook for more than a year, neither Buchheit nor the company was completely clear about what his title or role at the company was, although he says he made a few changes to the search engine a few days ago. At the same time Buchheit became busier investing and mentoring young founders, and scored some exits with Mint, Remail and Appjet. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Will Facebook Employees Get a Shorter Email Domain, or Will Users? Posted: 12 Nov 2010 08:59 AM PST Multiple sources have been saying for weeks that a new Facebook email service, dubbed “Project Titan” internally, is coming soon. And with the company’s invite to an event in San Francisco on Monday featuring an “Inbox” logo in the email, it seems to be hinting at it too. So, here’s the latest we’re hearing. Users’ vanity URLs are probably the first part of the email address, like what MySpace provided when it launched its email program last year. But it’s possible that the domain could be something shorter than vanity@facebook.com, like @fb.com. The domain fb.com is registered by brand protection firm MarkMonitor and its owner is concealed. In September, DomainNameWire reported that the previous owner of fb.com, the American Farm Bureau, sold the address to an unknown owner. MarkMonitor has also represented high-profile clients like Google and Apple in the past. There are other shortened domain possibilities. Fbmail.com is registered by web hosting company Dotster, Inc., while fmail.com is owned by another domain reseller Tucows., Inc. Tucows has represented Dell in the past. Facebook could own some or all of these, but may or may not use them. It also owns fb.me, which it has used as a URL shortener for links on mobile devices. The company has so far given @facebook.com accounts to employees. It might switch them to shorter domains, in order to give users the full Facebook name. It could also do what MySpace did, and give its employees a longer doman, such as ___@facebook-inc.com We covered some ways that Facebook could potentially add email to its Messages system yesterday. But we can also think of a few broader implications for the ecosystem: 1) How will developers take advantage of Facebook email as a new stronger viral channel to reach users? For the past year, developers have had to grapple with weaker viral channels as Facebook shut down notifications from apps to users, pressuring larger social gaming companies to depend more on advertising to find new users. The company has also encouraged third-party developers to ask for user email addresses directly, so it wouldn’t have to be the middle-man in app spam and suffer potential ill will. A facebook.com email address would give developers new opportunities to reach out to users directly. 2) Facebook will finally have most of the tools necessary to track strong ties as well as weak ones. For years, the company has touted its product as a way for users to keep in touch with hundreds of friends and strengthen so-called weak ties, or distant acquaintances. But the friends a user interacts with don’t necessarily correlate with what their closest friendships really are. With the introduction of Places and Groups, the company is now collecting the data to see who a person really spends time with or who they think is important enough to include in a small group of friends. Email adds another layer on top of this; who a person privately emails regularly is a stronger signal of a deep relationship than who they tend to comment on or like. 3) Facebook will have to come up with a new justification for blocking Google from importing its contact information. For the past week, Facebook and Google have been embroiled in a rather ugly public fight over whether the social network should reciprocate and let users export their friends’ email addresses to Gmail. Facebook responded that because it’s a social network, data ownership is different — users own their own information, but they do not own the information of their friends. If Facebook makes an entry into the email space, it will either need to let users export their friends’ email address or it will need to explain itself and its double standard for data portability. Lastly, Facebook could tie email in with a broader suite of products from third parties — like what it’s rumored to be doing with Microsoft’s Office Web Apps. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| More New Games Top This Week’s List of Emerging Facebook Apps Posted: 12 Nov 2010 08:14 AM PST
Hollywood City has added over half a million new users to Digital Chocolate, which also has Vegas City and Island God on the list. The first two are reskins of Millionaire City, while Island God is new. Digital Chocolate has been on a tear over the past month or so; it has another new game just out, called Epic Fighters, which resembles its game MMA Pro Fighter. Pogo Games is also worth a look. This Electronic Arts portal leads to a number of casual games, like other portals, but EA owns enough well-known IP to make its offering significantly different. Intelligent Elite is the list’s first non-game app. The app uses IQ and EQ (emotional quotient) tests to draw users in; when they’re done, they’re directed on to membership at the Intelligent Elite website, which bills itself as a dating site for smart folk.
Moving down, TravBuddy.com Countries Visited Map follows a well-worn path, having users mark where they’ve been on a world map. And friend.ly, the last app we’ll point out, is a connection tool for Facebook users to find people they don’t know in real life — something the social network itself has generally tried to avoid. |
Facebook Top Online Display Advertiser – ComScore 
Facebook Lures Foursquare Engineer – Facebook has lured 
Paul Buchheit, an early Google employee who coined its "Don't be evil" motto and created Gmail, is 
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