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Inside Facebook

Facebook Implements New API-Controlled Test User System for App Developers

Posted: 17 Nov 2010 04:51 PM PST

Facebook has implemented a new application testing system which allow developers to easily create tester user accounts. The fake accounts can be generated and friend each other through the Open Graph, but can’t interact with real users or public content such as Pages. They won’t ever be disabled by Facebook’s spam or fake account detection systems. This should remove the need for developers to manually create and manage fake accounts which are in violation of Facebook’s terms of service.

Previously, developers had to designate real accounts as Platform Application Test Accounts, but these accounts couldn’t test sandbox applications, and could never be returned to normal user status. The new system allows for sandbox as well as live application testing, and creates new accounts instead of converting existing accounts. 50 test users can be created for each application, and can be accessed by any developer associated with the app.

The new Test Users system comes with a set of API calls which use the access token of the application being tested. Along with creating test users and forging friendship connections between them, each user can be given a different set of extended permissions, make API calls, and be deleted once no longer needed. However, test users “cannot edit any technical settings or access insights” of the application they are testing.

Currently, test users can only be controlled via the API, though Facebook says developers will eventually be able to control them through the Developer application. The new Test User system should come as a relief to devs who were wasting time manually controlling test users and creating new ones when Facebook discovered and disabled their fake accounts.

Top 20 Growing Facebook Pages: Disney, Converse, Rihanna, Usher, Harry Potter and SpongeBob

Posted: 17 Nov 2010 02:30 PM PST

Another interesting mix of Pages on our list this week. There was everything from big brands like Coca-Cola and Converse to movies and TV shows to musicians and the ever-present Megan Fox. To make our list this week Pages needed to grow between 861,000 and 1.4 million Likes; we gather our information from our PageData service, which counts the number of Likes added to a Page each day.

Top Gainers This Week

Name Fans Gain↓ Gain, %
1. YouTube 20,938,174 +1,410,244 +7.22
2. Harry Potter 7,522,965 +1,405,441 +22.97
3. Facebook 26,530,514 +1,405,136 +5.59
4. Disney 11,540,759 +1,389,216 +13.68
5. Rihanna 15,143,636 +1,306,980 +9.45
6. Coca-Cola 17,836,804 +1,253,654 +7.56
7. Eminem 20,433,081 +1,240,122 +6.46
8. The Simpsons 13,454,222 +1,190,905 +9.71
9. Jackass 5,309,271 +1,175,744 +28.44
10. MTV 9,707,803 +1,155,890 +13.52
11. Converse All Star 9,895,071 +1,130,282 +12.90
12. Shakira 13,505,259 +1,079,925 +8.69
13. Converse 8,110,157 +1,003,035 +14.11
14. Usher 8,063,496 +974,380 +13.74
15. DORY 5,851,902 +969,260 +19.85
16. Toy Story 9,055,566 +936,843 +11.54
17. SpongeBob SquarePants 12,156,188 +916,971 +8.16
18. Bob Marley 14,977,162 +903,135 +6.42
19. Oreo 13,960,195 +866,168 +6.61
20. Megan Fox 17,584,050 +860,844 +5.15

Global brands made up a big chunk of our list.

YouTube was first on the list after adding 1.4 million Likes this week to come in just under 21 million. Facebook's Page was third after adding 1.4 million Likes, climbing to 26.5 million; probably some growth was attributable to news of their new data center in North Carolina and a new messaging service.

Coca-Cola was sixth, adding 1.2 million Likes to pass 17.8 million. Converse All Star's Page was at 11, with 1.1 million new Likes and a total of 9.8 million. A sister Page, Converse, added 1 million Likes to reach 8.1 million; both Converse Pages have been promoting a contest for musicians. Finally, Oreo was at number 19 with 866,200 Likes to bring the Page to almost 14 million Likes: the Page benefitted from a promotion from another Page, Baskin-Robbins, which was giving away a coupon for Oreo products.

There were a lot of media-related Pages on our list this week, too.

First, Disney's presence on our Top 20 list has become more noticeable in the recent past. Not only did Disney's main Page make our list at number four after adding about 1.4 million Likes to tally 11.5 million this week, but, two other Disney-affiliated Pages made the list. Dory, a character from "Finding Nemo," made the list this week after adding 969,300 Likes to grow to 5.8 million; this seems pretty high for an old movie, so perhaps there was some Page consolidation going on, although there was cross-promotion with the Disney Pixar Page recently, too. Then, the "Toy Story" Page added 936,800 Likes to pass 9 million. Although the third installment of the series was released on DVD and Blu-ray recently, this is also a very high growth pattern, so there could have been something else going on.

Other media Pages this week included movies and TV shows — and Megan Fox.

The "Harry Potter" Page came in second on our list this week after adding 1.4 million Likes to reach 7.5 million. The movie premiere will be later this week and the Page has been doing promotion with trailers, news and contests. At number 8 was "The Simpsons" TV show, which added 1.1 million Likes to grow to a total of 13.4 million; the show was also renewed for another season, nominated for awards and was promoting merchandise. Next, at number 9, was the "Jackass" movie franchise, which has been promoting the movie premiere in Europe, consequently adding 1.1 million Likes to its 5.3 million-strong Page.

MTV's Page was at number 10 with 1.1 million new Likes, a total of 9.7, and a bunch of promotion of its programming. Number 17 was the "SpongeBob SquarePants" Page, which added about 917,000 Likes after promoting the show's first mystery special. Finally, Megan Fox made it to number 20 on our list, adding 860,900 Likes to grow to 17.5 million by doing nothing other than begin sexy.

And music, as usual, was also big on the list.

Rihanna's Page was fifth after the release of her latest album, accompanying promotion and an ongoing photo contest for fans. The Page added 1.3 million fans to pass 15.1 million. Then Eminem came in seventh with 1.2 million new fans, passing 20.4 million, and posting some awards nominations. Shakira's Page was at number 12 with 1 million new fans, 13.5 million Likes, and lots of activity around her new album/tour. Usher's Page added 974,400 Likes to pass 8 million as he started his new tour; the Page took fourteenth place. Finally, at number 18, was the Bob Marley Page, which added 903,100 Likes to come in just under 15 million.

Editor’s note: A few PageData entries (like this one) appear to be double-counting total Likes on some days and not counting any Likes on others. We’ll provide more information as we figure out the problem.

Facebook’s New Inbox May Siphon Social, Informal Messages From Email

Posted: 17 Nov 2010 01:03 PM PST

After using Facebook’s overhauled Messages for a few days, we agree that is isn’t — as the company stresses — an email replacement. But it will help the social network absorb informal, social communication that would once have been relegated to the traditional email inbox.

On the surface, Facebook’s Messages appears to be a modest touchup. The revamp cleans out the noise from Groups and Events, shows a user’s entire conversation history and makes users reachable anywhere and on every device. It doesn’t have the newfangled, complex interface of Wave, Google’s failed take on the future of communication, and it doesn’t have IMAP or POP support, which would let users sync their Facebook Messages with other systems.

It’s simple, because the design constraint Facebook now confronts every time it launches a product is that it has to be palatable to mainstream, late adopters. So the company’s latest string of launches have been notable more for their potential to scale instead of their imaginative design.

That said, the new Messages was actually created with the text and chat-heavy habits of teenagers in mind, positioning the company to stay relevant to the next generation of information consumers. Users in their 20s, 30s and older may not give up Gmail or Yahoo Mail, but perhaps teens will develop a habit of giving out their @facebook.com addresses. The social network already facilitates 4 billion private messages a day and has 350 million active users on its Messages product.

“We don’t think a modern messaging system is going to be e-mail,” founder Mark Zuckerberg said, adding that the teenagers he interviewed complained that e-mail was too slow. Users had to enter a topic into the subject line and the person to whom it was addressed.

“It really adds a lot of friction and cognitive load to the process of sending e-mail,” he said. From this research, Zuckerberg and other Facebook engineers realized they needed to build a lightweight, constantly-present communications tool that would interface with older tools like e-mail.

He said that a modern system needed to have seven characteristics. It needed to be seamless, informal, immediate, personal, simple, minimal and short.

Here are a couple, long-term changes we could see happening with the new Messages:

  • Informal, social communication may migrate to Facebook away from email. Any type of messaging where Facebook was one of several options to reach a friend may consolidate on the social network. More formal types of communication — with work, or with your bank — will stay with email. Over time, this division could make email less attractive as more core, social communication moves to Facebook.
  • The SMS integration seems to be working well, without sending too many unnecessary expensive texts. In the past two to three days, I’ve only received one text despite receiving several messages a day. As Josh Constine pointed out in an earlier post, Facebook processes several signals to determine which medium to route it to. If the recipient is actively online on Facebook they'll receive the Message as a Chat. If the Message is a reply to an email, it will be sent to email. Users can check a box next to the reply field to purposefully send a text message.
  • Messages could fuel more friend requests as Facebook’s inbox becomes a more important gateway to communicating with people.
  • There aren’t any apparent opportunities for developers to use the Inbox as an additional channel to reach users. They will still have to reply on the Games dashboard, cross-promotion and advertising.
  • As we wrote in an earlier post, Messages will give Facebook extra data about a user’s strong ties. At its inception, Facebook was a tightly-knit, college network. But as it opened up to the public from 2006 onward, it became more about acquiring and strengthening weak ties instead of reinforcing existing close friendships. This came to a head at the end of last year, when Facebook made a series of changing defaulting more user information to be public. In the last half of 2010, the company has shifted back, launching a number of products like Groups and Places that are more about supporting closed, or real-world interaction. Messages adds another layer to this. The people a user messages privately may be closer than people they occasionally comment on.

Highlights This Week from the Inside Network Job Board: PlaySpan, Focused Labs, Playfish & More

Posted: 17 Nov 2010 11:26 AM PST

We recently launched the Inside Network Job Board – dedicated to providing you with the best job opportunities in the Facebook Platform and social gaming ecosystem.

Here are this week's highlights from the Inside Network Job Board, including positions at PlaySpan, Focused Labs, Playfish, Glu Mobile, Perfect World, Arkadium, Meteor Games, and Playdom.

Listings on the Inside Network Job Board are distributed to readers of Inside Facebook and Inside Social Games through regular posts and widgets on the sites. That way, you can be sure that your open positions are being seen by the leading developers, product managers, marketers, designers, and executives in the Facebook Platform and social gaming industry today.

Facebook Makes Change in Size of Embedded Flash Players Official

Posted: 17 Nov 2010 09:26 AM PST

Facebook has changed the dimensions of flash players embedded in the news feed from 460 by 460 pixels to 398 by 398 pixels. Facebook initially labeled the change a bug that would be fixed, but later made the change official. The new dimensions may cause some flash to be displayed improperly, so developers should check to ensure their flash attachments look right.

The dimension change was not on the developer roadmap (that we are aware of), and so may have caught many developers by surprise. Facebook recently implemented a new monthly migration system for allowing developers to integrate new features and bug fixes to the platform at the their own pace. The system was designed to make it easier for developers to handle these types of changes, but only works if the changes are in the roadmap.

The bug which initially caused the size change was reported on November 3rd. It retroactively changed the size of all flash players embedded in the news feed from 460 pixels to 398. The next day, Facebook engineer Mike Vernal confirmed on the bug report’s comment reel that developers should “operate under the assumption that that is a bug that we will be fixing shortly.” Four days later, though, the bug was not fixed and Facebook staffer Jeff Bowen asked developers for examples of malfunctioning flash players. Then two days later, Douglas Purdy, Facebook’s new Director of Developer Relations reversed Facebook’s position, explaining that “moving forward the size will be 398×398, but that size is subject to change (and your content will be scaled accordingly).”

The changed appeared at the same time that Facebook altered the format of stories in the news feed by reducing the text size and showing status updates or context for rich shares below a user’s name instead of on the same line. It is possible that Facebook was testing the new format which caused the bug, and when it decided to implement the new format the bug was simply accepted and labeled “WONTFIX.”

The back and forth on the decision further angered some developers, especially those with embeds including non-vector graphics which don’t scale properly. Facebook has worked hard to communicate platform changes lately, but that didn’t happen here.

Tags, Quizzes and More on This Week’s List of Fastest-Growing Facebook Apps by DAU

Posted: 17 Nov 2010 08:06 AM PST

This week’s AppData list of fastest-gaining Facebook apps by daily active users helps to surface a few new apps, as well as show that older concepts still have traction. Here’s the top 20:

Top Gainers This Week
Name DAU Gain Gain,%
1. Original Windows Live Messenger 9,572,993 +457,539 +5%
2. App_2_181606049889_436 Social Fun 477,874 +328,357 +220%
3. App_2_142727279103775_7311 Hollywood City 375,059 +225,676 +151%
4. App_2_157785064239480_3718 恐龍王國 431,378 +209,998 +95%
5. App_2_120563477996213_5785 Ravenwood Fair 423,210 +207,078 +96%
6. App_2_120956284629356_2299 Tag Friends 184,934 +179,919 +3,588%
7. Original BandPage by RootMusic 589,216 +170,550 +41%
8. App_2_333713683461_1100 Horoscopes 2,545,257 +168,790 +7%
9. Original Pet Society 2,221,119 +157,005 +8%
10. App_2_159048707462697_4831 Vegas City 199,744 +153,269 +330%
11. App_2_147473548614850_4042 عيد على صحابك 129,874 +127,710 +5,902%
12. Original Graffiti 356,763 +120,227 +51%
13. App_2_125318280856717_8426 Island God 148,867 +119,806 +412%
14. App_2_116318625062183_2941 SmileyCentral 186,275 +109,378 +142%
15. App_2_172139486132642_1208 Tư vấn vui 104,289 +98,524 +1,709%
16. App_2_127337483972992_1744 Facebook Live 108,402 +98,167 +959%
17. App_2_119866041395334_6883 It Girl 737,510 +93,367 +14%
18. Original Backyard Monsters 739,846 +89,619 +14%
19. Original Millionaire City 2,718,297 +87,943 +3%
20. Original Bubble Island 1,069,382 +86,319 +9%

Following Windows Live Messenger, the growth of which seems to finally be slowing somewhat, Social Fun is the latest friend quiz, asking users question about their friends in Spanish. Most English-language friend quizzes have now been suspended or otherwise discouraged by Facebook, but we do regularly see foreign-language versions popping up.

Hollywood City is one of the latest games from Digital Chocolate, which holds no fewer than four spots on the list, including Vegas City, Island God and Millionaire City. With the exception of Island God, all are city-builders. Digital Chocolate itself is nearing four million DAU, a not-inconsiderable amount.

Graffiti is one we haven’t seen in a while, but the drawing app is a perennial favorite. About a month ago, it released a full-screen draw feature with Bing sponsorship, which significantly eases use of the app.

Finally, Tư vấn vui is worth pointing out, simply because it’s in Vietnamese. Although not official policy, Vietnam’s government has more or less blocked Facebook for months. But as we recently discussed here, Facebook is growing in Vietnam anyway, and has aspirations of eventually securing a permanent foothold. In the meantime, Vietnamese users seem eager to access the social network.

torsdag den 18. november 2010 at 07.39