Inside Facebook
Inside Facebook |
- Phrases, Badges and a New Entrevista Appear on This Week’s List of Fastest-Growing Facebook Apps by MAU
- Facebook for iPhone Update Adds Quick Links to Account, Privacy Settings
- Facebook Will Allow Email Exporting — But Only of @facebook.com Addresses
- New Facebook Messages Only Provides an Online Attachment Viewing Feature for Microsoft Docs
- Facebook Employees Get @fb.com Addresses, While Users Get @facebook.com
- Facebook to Replace Messages APIs Without Adding New Functionality
- Facebook Fights Spam with the Authentic Social Graph
- Facebook Announces Seamless Messaging Across Communication Mediums
- Facebook Users Send 4 Billion Private Messages a Day
- Live-Blogging Facebook’s Event in San Francisco — Email Product Is Here
| Posted: 15 Nov 2010 07:59 PM PST
Nothing lasts forever; Phrases may be showing early signs of a fall in user numbers following its recent shutdown for American users. But it’s too early to tell for sure, since Phrases’ daily active user count, the fastest-responding indicator for any app, has gone through significant fluctuations before. Here’s the full list:
The three games that follow Badges are all fairly new, but we expect all of them to last for some time — especially Crime City, which appears to be the Mafia Wars of 2010. Skipping down, BandPage by RootMusic has just crossed 10 million MAU, suggesting that Facebook is becoming the new place for bands to create their homepages. And Entrevista Amigos you may recognize from its cousin Entrevistas Tus Amigos, which appears to have become “Friend Quiz”, in English. The new Entrevista is in Spanish. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Facebook for iPhone Update Adds Quick Links to Account, Privacy Settings Posted: 15 Nov 2010 02:21 PM PST The latest update to the Facebook for iPhone app includes links to a user’s Account Settings, Privacy Settings, and the Help Center. The links open these areas of the Facebook web interface through the app’s internal web browser, and allow users to alter all of their sharing, security, and other settings. Having easy access a one’s mobile settings, such as the hours of the day during which you receive text messages from Facebook, will be important as users begin having their Facebook Messages routed to SMS.
Facebook released a significant upgrade to its iPhone app last week, which included Groups, Deals, and enhanced Places functionality, but which prevented users from uploading photos to a specific album. Version 3.2.3 fixes this bug, allowing users to click an ‘+’ button while viewing an existing album to add a photo to it.
Earlier this year, Facebook added a lock icon to the iPhone app’s status composer, allowing users to set the distribution parameter for that update. However, until now users had to access rudimentary privacy controls via m.facebook.com, or manually navigate to Facebook’s web interface using a mobile browser to alter the distribution of new or existing photos, change what parts of their profile are visible to who, or edit block lists. When Facebook updated its privacy controls in May, we said that offering these controls to mobile users was a crucial next step. Now, where users previously saw a logout button in the top left of the app’s home page, they’ll see an “Account” button which reveals options to logout, or visit Account Settings, Privacy Settings, or the Help Center. Access to privacy controls should encourage users to share more frequently by restricting content to fewer people. Notification settings access will make it easier to quiet Facebook if a user is receiving unwanted mobile or email alerts.
Facebook’s new Messages product delivers email, Facebook Messages, Facebook Chat, and text messages to whichever channel a user is currently using, including their phone via SMS messages. However, it’s possible that users who’ve connected their mobile phone number to their Facebook account won’t be aware of the volume of SMS they’ll begin to receive, or the charges associated with these messages. Therefore, giving iPhone users quick access to their Account Settings->Mobile where they can turn off SMS from Facebook, alter which actions trigger SMS messages, or set a daily limit will be helpful for mitigating any ill will against Facebook stemming from the charges. While the settings panels are only linked to and not full integrated into the application, they make Facebook for iPhone practically a standalone version of the site. For those who don’t often sit down with a computer to access Facebook, the update should lead to a safer, more customized experience. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Facebook Will Allow Email Exporting — But Only of @facebook.com Addresses Posted: 15 Nov 2010 01:58 PM PST In a slight tweak to a policy that inflamed relations with Google earlier this month, Facebook will allow users to export their friends’ @facebook.com email addresses to other services. They won’t, however, be able to export email addresses from other providers, according to spokesperson Larry Yu. For the past few weeks, Facebook and Google have been embroiled in a very public dispute over contact importers. Google for years has allowed Facebook users to import their friends’ email addresses into the social network. But Facebook has not given users the opportunity to send their friends’ information and email addresses back to Gmail, creating as Google called it — a “data dead end.” Google changed its terms of service a little over a week ago in a very pointed move at Facebook, asking the social network to reciprocate. Facebook declined, arguing that a social network is fundamentally different from email and that because of privacy concerns, users can’t own or share the email addresses of their friends (although it has made special exceptions for partners like Yahoo and Microsoft). Today the company launched a new Messages product that integrates email and gives users @facebook.com addresses, which would seemingly invalidate the company’s earlier arguments. However, Facebook’s new policy is that users will be able to export their friends’ @facebook.com addresses, but not email addresses from other providers. It doesn’t particularly help Google though. Even if Google or another company managed to recreate parts of the social graph by importing @facebook.com addresses, these companies would still have to contact these users by their @facebook.com accounts, leaving the social network as the middleman. One more important note: Theoretically, because Facebook email addresses are made up of the vanity URL and then @facebook.com, Google and other bots should be able to crawl all public Facebook.com URLs and come up with a list of many, if not most, of the social network’s users’ email addresses. But because of Facebook’s spam protections, even if a bot or Google crawled the web for @facebook.com addresses, they wouldn’t be able to spam it because a user can only receive messages from friends and friends of friends in their main inbox. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| New Facebook Messages Only Provides an Online Attachment Viewing Feature for Microsoft Docs Posted: 15 Nov 2010 12:03 PM PST In another move highlighting Facebook’s strategic relationship with investor Microsoft, the company has given the established office software provider special online access to users in its new Message Inbox system. Users who upgrade to the new version of the Inbox will see the option to view Doc attachments online — but not anything else.
Message attachments generally work as you’d expect. Click on the paperclip logo in the message creation form, then select the document on your desktop that you’d like to upload. Send it — to yourself, if you’re looking to test the integration out for yourself. The sent message will show your attached documents. If they end in a Doc format for Word, Excel or Powerpoint, you’ll also see a dropdown that includes two links — one to download and one to see the preview on Microsoft’s Office Live site. No other types of documents will be available in preview mode. Also, if you want to edit, save and download the attachments, you’ll need to have a desktop version of Office installed.
We talked to Facebook engineers about this integration, to see if any other formats (like PDFs) might somehow become available in preview mode. They said it wasn’t what they’re focusing on now.
So, Microsoft gets a subtle but powerful promotion in Facebook, while users can only view Docs inside Facebook, or otherwise download the document and read it that way — a less convenient choice. Gmail and other email programs have tried to make previewing as easy as possible for all formats. For Facebook, one ramification of Microsoft’s special access is less value for users who want to share a document in any other format. Maybe the average user doesn’t want to sha | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Facebook Employees Get @fb.com Addresses, While Users Get @facebook.com Posted: 15 Nov 2010 11:37 AM PST Last week, we broke the story that Facebook employees might get even shorter email addresses with a domain @fb.com. Hours later, the fb.com address was publicly transferred to Facebook from the American Farm Bureau. Today the company confirmed our story. While users will get @facebook.com addresses, the company’s employees will change to @fb.com. Founder Mark Zuckerberg said the company had long internal discussions about what to give users. “If we could give users our very best with @facebook.com, we would,” he said. After making the decision, the company went searching for an alternative domain for employees. In September, the American Farm Bureau sold its domain, fb.com, to an undisclosed buyer represented by MarkMonitor, an expensive brand protection agency that has served Apple in the past. On Friday, the domain’s owner was finally disclosed as the social network. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Facebook to Replace Messages APIs Without Adding New Functionality Posted: 15 Nov 2010 11:29 AM PST Facebook’s new Messages product is built on the new hBase storage system, and will therefore require a new set of Messages APIs. There won’t be added functionality in the APIs, though, and they aren’t designed to give developers new channels for communicating with users. A beta of the new read-only API will be available to registered developer accounts, but developers with existing applications can still call the old APIs until the new Messages product is rolled out to all users. The read Graph API and FQL let applications which receive permission from a user to access their inbox. The APIs could be used to build desktop inbox readers, or mash a user’s Messages history with other data to create message maps, rich content timelines, or provide statistics on who a user messages with.
The new Messages product works with the Jabber and XMPP instant messaging standards, so all existing apps which integrate with Facebook Chat will function normally. Facebook is considering creating additional APIs to give applications more granular inbox access and control. The company is looking to gather more information on what developers would be interested in using before making a decision. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Facebook Fights Spam with the Authentic Social Graph Posted: 15 Nov 2010 10:32 AM PST Facebook has devised an interesting and people-centric approach to fighting spam. By giving out @facebook.com email addresses to all users, the company could have opened up potentially disastrous issues with spam. The first part of a users’ email address is their vanity URL address or http://www.facebook.com/name. Because those URLs are crawlable, that means bots will easily be able to find millions of email addresses to spam. However, Facebook is confronting this by using the social graph — only people who are a user’s friends or friends of friends can e-mail them. If a person not connected to a user e-mails them, it will go to the ‘Other’ part of the inbox. If they find those messages important, they can move them from that folder into the main part of the inbox. From then on, they’ll get all emails from that person immediately. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Facebook Announces Seamless Messaging Across Communication Mediums Posted: 15 Nov 2010 10:14 AM PST Facebook has announced an update to its in-house Messages application that will seamlessly integrate email, Facebook messages, SMS, IM, and Facebook Chat. The product will include a full conversation history from all the mediums, and a social inbox which filters messages according to what a user wants to see. Last week, we speculated that Facebook would be refining how users sort the messages they receive.
Product DetailsRegardless of where the message is delivered, it will appear in the thread which notifications lead back to. Users can trigger through the interface whether they want the message to be sent to a specific medium of a friend, such as SMS to their phone. Otherwise, it will be routed automatically. For instance, if a user is online when they’re sent a message, they’ll receive it as a Chat. Users will have the option to forward select messages from a thread to another user, one of the most requested features for Messages. They can also be added or removed from threads to join or leave a conversation. By default, you’ll only see messages from friends and friends of friends in your primary inbox. The “Other Messages” view will show users what they don’t care as much about, including Event messages. Senders can be moved between these two inboxes. Facebook expects users will constantly check their main folder, and occasionally check their Other Messages. While users can’t “go off the record” while messaging, they’ll be able to permanently archive or delete threads. File attachments can be sent, and IMAP will be supported soon. Underlying Technology, Security, and PrivacyTo implement the new system, Facebook built a new storage system called hBase, and started a fifteen engineer team, the biggest for any new Facebook product. Facebook is shifting away from the Cassandra storage system it built. As for security, instead of relying on a “security by obscurity” method of inbox privacy, users will have control of who can send them messages. They can change their privacy settings to bounce back messages from those they don’t want to receive messages from. The product will be rolled out over the next few months, starting with an invite system. CEO Mark Zuckerberg says this is not a Gmail killer, and that Facebook doesn’t expect people to immediately switch all their email to the product. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Facebook Users Send 4 Billion Private Messages a Day Posted: 15 Nov 2010 10:04 AM PST Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said 350 million of the company’s estimated 550 million users are on the social network’s inbox feature per month, and they send 4 billion private messages a day through its system. He gave these statistics at an announcement today in San Francisco, where the company launched an e-mail product. The point of the numbers, of course, is that Facebook will be plugging its new version of the product into a massive pre-installed user base. You can read our live blog of the event here. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Live-Blogging Facebook’s Event in San Francisco — Email Product Is Here Posted: 15 Nov 2010 09:55 AM PST The rumors about a Facebook email product have crescendoed in the last week, ahead of a Facebook press event happening today in San Francisco — and we’re here, live-blogging it. Will it be a full-featured email service of some sort, or just a partial upgrade to its existing Message system? See our previous coverage of what we and others have heard, what the product might look like, and what the results might be for more. The answer, as you can read below, is some of both. Facebook has created a revamped Message Inbox that combines email, text messaging, instant messaging and its existing service to create what it views as a new form of one-to-one communication. Our product overview is here, and our analysis of how the product can do things like spam is here. The following is paraphrased in some parts. Live Blog9:59 Mark Zuckerbeg has taken the stage. Talking to high schooler — email is too slow, they complained. It’s too formal, the weight and the friction, having to think of an address of a person. Think of a subject line. Write “hey mom” at the top to introduce it. Write “Love, Mark” at the end. What do they use? “We use SMS and Facebook,” the high schoolers tell Mark. “How do you find out?” “We’re already on Facebook.” “Oh, that’s good.” They’re using much simpler forms, lighter weight. Built handful of products for modern messaging system. Around 350 million people are using messaging on Facebook, because it’s a really simple system. There are more than 4 billion messages sent every day through the Facebook system — messages, IMs, private, private sharing that goes on in the service. How people are social, sharing things. Publicly, everyone in their community. Vast majority is one to one between two people. Not Pages or anything, but one to one, very simple communication. We tried to graph out. We tried to make other features stable, faster. 10:05 What we think the problem space is. Modern messaging system won’t be email. Bunch of characteristics to it. Seamless integration across all the ways that you interact with technology. All the different channels that you might want to use — IM. Informal. Having formal adds cognitive load, people don’t want to share quite as much. Immediate. Real-time communication like IM and some SMS. Personal. SMS is high signal to noise. Very likely someone who you care about. Email, there’s a ton of stuff in there. Simple. We should take features away, not add. Short. Make it so they can share in shorter bursts. These are some of the characteristics we should cover today. 1. Seamless messaging. You can have .com messages, but not primary way. Goal is to make it so that we can seamlessly integrate. 2. Conversation History Spreading model — archaic. Subjects, threads. In real life, you have a conversation with them. Our view is that a lot of the more modern communication vehicles that people are using. Make it super simple. IMs, emails, messages, go into that. Five years from now, a full rich history. Friends, things around you. 3. Social Inbox Really good filtering to only show what you care about. Sophisticated. Really good at getting rid of real junk. Lots of different classes of junk. Really difficult for you to know if you should care about what they have to say. People have acknowledged white lists — but it hasn’t really been practical to do that. 10:10 You get messages. Social inbox. Really high default experiences for you. Not junk. Really compelling experience. These are the three things that we think create a modern messaging system. Seamless integration. Email, but not only email. Contacts all in one place. A social inbox. That’s what we’re going to talk about today. 1. Seamless Integration Engineer Andrew Bozworth is on. One of the first things we thought to do. Chat and messages. Text to SMS. Email, Facebook. Take all the conversations, all the messages back and forth on different devices. Throw them together, between two people. Email, they should be able to do that. Match their public user name. Facebook.com Everything else works perfectly fine without the email. As much as we are providing this email address, the system is definitely not email. We’ve actually modeled it more after chat. Example: My buddy Ben is browsing around, pops up on chat, could ignore his message (about getting lunch), that sounds pretty good, but I can’t remember the place we’d been talking about. That sounds like what we want to do. Press enter key, sends by default. After that I leave and he’ll get on his computer. 10:15 Email user, forgot to pick up friend Anne. Push notification. Respond in Facebook. Launching iPhone app along with that today. Works with a whole range of technologies. Works just fine. Integration:
2. Conversation History When we were planning this, my Grandma has this. Letters written by my Grandfather when they were dating. That kind of thing is rare. Where is mine? Locked up in phone, email services… until now. This is my actual conversation history with my girlfriend going back four years. Doesn’t include email, doesn’t include text messages. Not just being romantic, this is just nostalgia. If the last three were “I miss you, I love you.” Even if I had a bad day, what will my next message be. Individually not profound, but collectively form a conversation about someone I care a lot about. We had to rebuild infrastructure that the product was built on. Invested heavily in key value store called Cassandra. Tested with MySQL, not sure how it would perform with lots of data. Rebuilt infrastructure to hBase. We worked closely with open source community, built internally. 10:20 Also extended Haystack infrastructure. Every Christmas Momma sends out a spreadsheet of gift lists. Supports attachments. We use Thrift, Zookeeper, memcache that we built from the ground up to support. Biggest engineering team Facebook has ever put together — 15 engineers. 3. Social Inbox. Seen a message from my mother — bank statement or bill. We have an opportunity to organize by who you care about. By default, you’re going to see messages from your friends and their friends only. If your grandmother, their friends, wind up in other folder, you can move to the “Messages.” Otherwise it’s in “Other.” I want to get these things, not what I care about. We expect users to always be engaging with the Messages folder. One of the last things that is really powerful about social graph, when applied. Once we get an email up, a phone number, it’s lost. I don’t have a chance. But with Facebook, we can do much better, from security by obscurity to genuine control. If you can change your settings to bounce any email — but they didn’t have the one thing that matters, the social graph. Provide a place where people can have conversations with the people they care about. 10:25 Zuck is back on. We don’t expect to kill Yahoo Mail or whatever People’s habits are changing, maybe email isn’t as important before. Maybe we can push people towards a more seamless, real-time personal message. Rolling out slowly over a period of a next few months. Starting with invite system. Press is in initial set. Get you feedback as we’re doing that. Now Boz and I will answer questions, or try to. The full announcement here. Q&AQ: What about multiple people? Zuck: We don’t think that’s the way the world is going to go. Q: What about other email, IM, how do you decide which goes in. 10:30 Zuck: One of the complicated things that we had to work out and iterate on a lot in the last year. For example, if you have been interacting with someone through email, we’ll send your replies back through email. A person can trigger through interface. Maybe in the future we’ll know if they have an iPhone app, Android app and deliver that way. Make it really simple and lightweight. A lot of nuance, that we call the “policy engine” for messages. Boz: To try to make it so it feels like a conversation. Zuck: So they don’t have to think about this stuff. Q: Like VoIP? Zuck: Maybe over time, but we wanted to unite the four because they’re basically text. We’ll see how users ask for, how they use the product, one that we just wanted to take before we started working on the next set of things. Q: Have any advertising? Content targeting for ads? Effect over time with rivalry with Google? Zuck: Like other relevance we do. There’s nothing specific about that (that they’re talking about today). I think Gmail’s a really good product. We’re retiring the gigabox system in exchange for the new tighter system that we’ve built. In reality, a tighter product and how people are changing their communication. Boz: Use Gmail, cool. Doesn’t matter what service they use. 10:35 Q: Gmail has a nice feature chat function where you can delete. Boz: Users can delete. In other systems, email and IM are two different things. Zuck: Our system, more temporal. On the other side, they’re receiving SMS. People can obviously say “I don’t want this message stored.” In terms of separating out email and IM. One of the things we’re doing is converging — we concluded that the metaphor didn’t make sense. Q: What is the biggest challenge that Facebook has had to date. 10:40 Boz: I don’t want to fight about which was the biggest challenge. But we put a lot into this. If we’re doing our job well, it’s very much what they’re used to. If they’re used to IM, chat, Jabber, all those things will work the same way. Hopefully provide a place that feels more ongoing. A more continuous conversation. Q: How do you have control over communication? You archive forever? Boz: Yes, we want to make sure people communicate with whoever they want to. Shouldn’t preclude people from using the service that they like. If on Facebook users have this expectation that they’ll have conversations with the people they care about. What do they do with that? Zuck: If you’re not part of the Facebook system, it’ll go into other. We expect that that problem can very quickly get solved. Put this person in my main folder. That person sends me an email. Q: Content filtering. She likes to send a lot of forwards of cat photos, is there further filtering you can do on the content side? Zuck: No, but there’s only going to be one thread with her. Q: As you’re adding, what happens to messages you don’t get on Facebook. 10:45 Boz: Store email address as list of contacts. We have to do that in order for the product to work. I think that’s what you’re asking. Q: What happens to corporate email addresses? Zuck: After a long discussion, the farm bureau has agreed to give us Fb.com. This is a big conversation internally. Our philosophy is so important to the people who use the product, we should really give them the best. Fb.com seems reasonable, and that’s what we are. After today, fb.com. Q: If I have people on my Facebook account, happens to be Facebook friends. But more casual, not Facebook friends. I use a separate email account, Yahoo. Boz: Anyone who’s already your friends and friends of friends. Q: Before, Facebook was about expanding to new connections. Boz: Goal for Facebook was never to expand, it was to map it out. Q: Text messaging? Boz: Already built, but if you don’t want to do that, you can choose not to. Q: Filling in any holes? Associating anything with profiles? Boz: This email address is actually my friend — ok. But send as SMS, can send. If that person doesn’t have SMS, we’ll give the option of inviting them. “You’re friend wants to send you an SMS but you don’t have it configured.” Q: How much storage space? Forwarding? Boz: Yes to forwarding. Among most requested for Facebook. Very selective, let’s you select which ones. Add ability in group conversation. Add to thread, delete from thread. Something that we’re not going to give a specific number — way modern message systems are going. If you’re a good user, and using this thing without using it. For people who try to find limits, they will find limits. If you’re using appropriately, you’re fine. Q: Primary? Way to redirect to Facebook? Boz: Goal is easy way to communicate with someone you care about. Any plans to reroute internet? Make sure our protocols work with those. We’ve certainly optimized for this to be focused on friends. 10:50 The event is over. |
To preserve the privacy of a user’s inbox, applications won’t be able to message users at their @facebook.com email address, which can easily be determined from a user’s vanity URL or user ID. This creates a layer of protection which can be penetrated by a user’s friends and other humans, but not by applications looking to send unsolicited email.
It will take all the communication between two people, regardless of medium, and show it in one thread. Users will have an @facebook.com email address with their public vanity URL as the prefix. However, the new Messages will look more like Chat, with messages added to threads in real-time and the option to instantly reply. “Our goal is for it to feel like a conversation” says Director of Engineering Andrew Bosworth, “people should share however they want to share.”| You are subscribed to email updates from Inside Facebook To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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