Inside Facebook
Inside Facebook |
- Invite Email Contacts to Like your Facebook Page with “Tell your Fans”
- Highlights This Week from the Inside Network Job Board: Kabam, Storm8, iRok2, & More
- Facebook Confirms Tab Application User Count Bug, Plans Fix Today
- Top 25 Facebook Games for December 2010
- Video and Mobile Apps Appear on This Week’s List of Fastest-Growing Facebook Apps by DAU
- Another Early Facebook Employee Slips Out: Engineering Leader Aditya Agarwal
| Invite Email Contacts to Like your Facebook Page with “Tell your Fans” Posted: 01 Dec 2010 03:18 PM PST Facebook Page admins can now send all their email contacts an invitation to Like their Page through a new tool called “Tell your Fans”. Contacts can be imported directly from supported email web services or uploaded through a contact file. The tool is available to “admins of any new or smaller Pages”, and can help businesses convert their email database they’ve built for years into a Facebook audience.
Facebook added friend-to-friend Page suggestions in mid-2009. Earlier this year, Facebook began allowing users to send app and game invitations to their email contacts. Previously, Page admins could only manually select friends to send invitations to, and couldn’t send them to those not on Facebook or who weren’t their friends. Now, Page admins can go to the Page Admin Interface, click the “Marketing” sidebar navigation link, and choose the new “Tell your Fans” tool. It’s currently unclear what Pages qualify as new or small enough to use the tool, but in our testing a Page with 21,000 Likes that has existed for years still had access.
Admins are given two options: Upload a Contact file, or Find Your Web Email Contacts. Upload a Contact File lets admins use a flash uploader to choose an Outlook, Constant Contact, .csv, or other contacts file. Admins then see a progress bar as the file uploads.
Find Your Web Email Contacts prompts users to enter the email address and password for their account on one of many supported email services including Hotmail, Yahoo, and apparently Google, despite Facebook’s recent clashes with the search giant over data portability and contact sharing. However, when importing contacts from Gmail accounts, we’re seeing the message “Everyone on this list is already associated with your Page”, despite having many contacts who don’t Like the Page. This could be an unrelated error, or Google could be blocking the feature. Regardless, Gmail contacts can still be exported and uploaded through the first option.
Once the contacts have been uploaded or imported, admins see a list of names and email addresses who “are not yet associated with [Page name].” All contacts default to selected, but admins can uncheck boxes to exempt certain contacts from receiving an invitation. The language in which the invitations are sent can be changed. To ensure admins know what they’re sending, they must view a preview of the invitation before being allowed to send the invitations.
Those who have a Facebook account associated with one of the selected email addresses will see a Recommended Page sidebar module. This is much less direct and prominent than the Page Suggestions users get from friends which appear on their Requests Page and the Requests panel of the home page’s right sidebar.
Those without a Facebook account connected to a selected email address receive an email stating “Check out [Page name]. [Page name] is inviting you to join Facebook.” When the included link is clicked, users are prompted to “Sign up to connect with [Page name] on Facebook.” When they complete the sign up process, they’re brought directly to the Page.
The Tell your Fans tool will make it significantly easier to start a successful Page from scratch. It should lower the apprehension of businesses and other organizations about making the move to Facebook because they will be able to use their existing contact resources. Admins of Pages often purchase advertising to further grow their audience, so each additional Page that’s created or grown large enough to advertise because of Tell your Fans represents potential revenue for Facebook. By getting businesses to dump their email addresses in to Facebook, the social network gains valuable data about connections between email addresses which can be used to power friend recommendations and more. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Highlights This Week from the Inside Network Job Board: Kabam, Storm8, iRok2, & More Posted: 01 Dec 2010 12:00 PM PST The Inside Network Job Board is 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 Kabam, Storm8, iRok2 Media, EA, Streetview Labs, Cellufun and Ubisoft.
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 Confirms Tab Application User Count Bug, Plans Fix Today Posted: 01 Dec 2010 10:35 AM PST Facebook has confirmed that a bug in Application Insights is causing views of tab applications to not be counted. This has dropped the daily active user count to zero or very few and decreased the monthly active user count for tab applications. The bug’s status has been set to “ASSIGNED” and Facebook has told us it should be fixed today.
Insights has experienced significant fluctuations in the past, typically due to bugs in user count reporting, or the fixes of those bugs. These cause apps and Pages counts to suddenly drop, then jump back up to reflect the actual changes in usage during the bug period. Facebook’s native analytics system for Pages, applications, and Open Graph websites, was overhauled at this year’s f8 conference, According to Facebook’s Platform team, the following actions are registered by Insights and increase MAU and DAU counts as of January 2009, those these may have changed since:
The tab application reporting bug was submitted on November 29th, confirmed by Facebook on November 30th, and affects reporting as far back as November 22nd. The impact of the bug can be seen on the AppData graph of November DAU for popular tab application BandPage by RootMusic shown above. Notice the drop from 544,555 DAU to only 11,089 on November 24th. This is turn decreases the MAU count, in this case dropping BandPage below the 10 million user milestone it reached in mid-November.
Accurate user counts can be crucial to developers, who use Insights to track the influence of design changes on engagement and demonstrate success to investors. Many developers were alarmed and disgruntled by the bug — something Facebook is seeking to avoid as it tries to improve relations with the ecosystem as part of Operation Developer Love. While bugs can be difficult to prevent, notifying developers as soon as possible via a message on Insights could reduce confusion and ill will. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Top 25 Facebook Games for December 2010 Posted: 01 Dec 2010 09:45 AM PST
As with last year, the holiday traffic slowdown appears to be underway for the largest social games on Facebook. However, the decline of monthly active users over the past few months have already been quite high — especially bad last month, many of the older running titles are still losing users in the millions. That said, December 1st has revealed a few new faces on the Top 25 as well as the rise of fresher titles in general, including the still growing Millionaire City, Car Town, and Crime City. Looking at the top 25 also obscures the bigger stories of the year. Developers of all sizes, including the owners of the apps you see here, have greatly improved monetization regardless of growth. And hundreds of smaller apps have been growing more than ever, as we’ve covered in detail here. With more and more social games increasing their sophistication and production quality in terms of play, storytelling, and overall engagement, such will no doubt continue to grow whereas the older titles will experience the natural decline of age. > Continue reading on Inside Social Games. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Video and Mobile Apps Appear on This Week’s List of Fastest-Growing Facebook Apps by DAU Posted: 01 Dec 2010 08:45 AM PST
Here’s the full list:
Windows Live Messenger, the tie-in to the popular messaging utility, and Tag Friends, a sort of tag-based friend quiz, come in at the top of the list, but both are fairly straightforward. Number three, Snaptu, is where the mobile apps begin. Snaptu’s specialty is building smartphone apps that work across platforms; this particular mobile app just provides access to Facebook. That’s also the case for Sprint Mobile and HTC Sense, which are respectively distributed by a carrier and handset maker. Most of these new DAUs coming to Facebook will be from phones running Android, although Ovi by Nokia also comes in just below where the list printed above cuts off, at number 21. Realannoyingorange is one of the less pleasant things that one might choose to spend a morning watching; just imagine an orange with big teeth and eyes talking to you (or check out the screenshot below). The entire app’s purpose seems to be notifying users when Realannoyingorange posts a new video on YouTube. This could, unfortunately, be a the start of a small viral hit on Facebook.
Almost all of the games on today’s list have appeared before, with the exception of a couple of the Chinese-language apps. Over on Inside Social Games, where we restrict the list to only games, foreign-language apps are leading the charge today, far outstripping their English-language counterparts. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Another Early Facebook Employee Slips Out: Engineering Leader Aditya Agarwal Posted: 01 Dec 2010 08:19 AM PST
The departure isn’t too surprising. A number of Facebook’s earliest employees have left in the past year, including Agarwal’s wife and fellow engineering leader, Ruchi Sanghvi. The company has quickly grown past 500 million users and towards 2000 employees, it has hired many experienced engineers and executives from around the technology world, and it is inevitably becoming somewhat slower-moving (despite its best efforts to move fast and “break things” in the process). In terms of financial incentives, early employees who held stock options have been able to sell some of what they hold; they’ll be able to sell more once they leave, too. Meanwhile, a date for an initial public offering — the traditional goal for early employees — is as unspecified as it ever has been. Agarwal, however, appears to be planning on something startup-related, possibly using the Facebook platform. Towards the end of his announcement, he dropped an intriguing hint (our bolding, below): I am extremely inspired by the changes that Facebook has affected throughout the Internet ecosystem and how it has changed user expectations about great products. Our Platform has created a unique set of opportunities for building products on the foundations of the social graph. It will be the cornerstone of many future disruptions, some of which I hope to accelerate. [Image via CNET.] |
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