Inside Facebook
Inside Facebook |
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- Facebook Roundup: Office Expansion, Social Searches, Black Friday, Gowalla, Places, Zuckerberg and Gawker
- Facebook Developer Update: Facepile Plugin and Graph API Features
- Facebook for Android v1.4 Mobile App Includes Places and Groups, but Still Lags Behind iPhone
- The Year in Facebook-Powered Shopping
- Games Fill Up This Week’s List of Emerging Facebook Apps
| Posted: 03 Dec 2010 10:00 PM PST Inside Facebook extends a big thank you to our sponsors for supporting the continued growth of Inside Facebook. Check them out below!
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| Posted: 03 Dec 2010 07:30 PM PST Facebook Expanding to New York - VentureBeat reported that Facebook has leased two floors with up to 150,000 square feet at 335 Madison Avenue that may accommodate as many as 600 people. Social Searching on Bing, Google - SearchEngineLand did a great writeup on the differing ways Bing and Google incorporate social into their current searches.
Black Friday Spending Grows With Facebook - Social networks like Facebook were instrumental in helping to drive Black Friday sales up 16% this year from last year. Gowalla Adds Places Integration – Location service Gowalla released an upgrade this week that included a feature allowing users to incorporate other check-in location services like Facebook's Places. Pulse Integrates Facebook for iPad - Pulse, a popular visual RSS reader, has added a sharp-looking Facebook integration to its iPad app. More at the link.
Gamaroff Releases Places History App - Gamaroff Digital released their new Places product this week, PlaceCheck, which allows users to view your Facebook friends' Places check-ins over time on a Google map. Facebook, Skype Preparing VideoChat? - It appears that Skype and Facebook are preparing to partner to launch a video chat feature called VideoChat. More at the link. [Image Via Green Any Site]
Importance of Gawker's Facebook Traffic – The blog network reported this week that Facebook referrals have increased sixfold since the beginning of the year. Activist Social Network Launches – Jumo is a social network designed to help social causes and activism and was launched by Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes.
Zuckerberg on 60 Minutes this Sunday - Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is set to appear on CBS' "60 Minutes" program on Sunday. Former President Bush Visits Facebook – Former President George W. Bush visited Facebook this week and participated in a live Q&A on Facebook with CEO Mark Zuckerberg. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Facebook Developer Update: Facepile Plugin and Graph API Features Posted: 03 Dec 2010 06:52 PM PST Facebook has a few more developer updates out this week. Here’s a quick look: Promotions guidelines: We covered the main changes earlier this week — the company is dropping the $10,000 minimum spending requirement for promotions on Pages, as well as the existing pre-approval process. Note that the guidelines also have been updated to include Places as one of the actions that users take, along with existing options such Liking a Page. Facepile improvements: The plugin now lets developers show friends who have liked Pages or Open Graph pages; XFBML and iFrame versions are both available, as well. Tabs deprecation schedule: Facebook has provided some more details on its planned API and FBML tag deprecations: We will continue letting developers create new FBML Page tab applications until Q1 2011, because we are still working on the iFrame implementation. We are also postponing the deprecation of fb:board until we offer the ability to export data. Graph API features: Friend lists can now be accessed through the API, including the ability for developers to ask for read_friendlists and manage_friendlists permissions. Similar functionality is available for Likes on comments, including read, write and delete. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Facebook for Android v1.4 Mobile App Includes Places and Groups, but Still Lags Behind iPhone Posted: 03 Dec 2010 05:59 PM PST
The latest version of the Facebook for Android mobile application reduces the functionality gap between Google’s younger OS and the iOS by adding new features Places and Groups. However, some core features such as Chat and push notifications are still missing, leading many Android users to feel neglected or ignored by the app’s development team. The Facebook for Android v1.4 follows the August v1.3 update which added the ability to respond to friend requests and Event invites, video playback, a redesigned home page, and a photo carousel which is unique to Android. The most recent release might have come sooner, but Facebook said at its mobile event that Google bought the company it was outsourcing development of the app to at the last minute. Single sign-on, allowing other Facebook-integrated Android apps to piggyback on a user’s login to the Facebook for Android app, was also announced at the mobile event. However, neither Facebook Deals nor the new Messages product appear to be supported. The features added in v1.4 run smoothly. Groups, accessible through a home page icon, lets users see a list of their Groups with counters denoting unread posts. Users can read posts, share to a Group’s feed, and see a Group’s members.
Places can only be accessed from its home page icon, and there is no option to check in through the news feed. Users can view check-ins of friends, choose a nearby Place to check in to, and tag friends, similar to the first Facebook for iPhone release with Places.
However, v1.4 doesn’t include second generation Places functionalities such as being able to add a photo to a check-in, or tag additional friends after the check-in has been made, which are available in the latest Facebook for iPhone 3.3.1.
Users now see notifications about comments and updates which link to that activity within the app. High resolution photo uploads are also supported in this release. Along with the lack of Facebook Deals, users must still use external apps such as Go!Chat to instant message with their Facebook friends. This is a major gripe amongst Android users, with hundreds pleading for Chat on the Facebook for Android Page where the updates to the app are announced. The other significant deficiency is the lack of push notifications, meaning users must constantly open the app to check for new notifications.
Facebook was slow to begin developing an app for the Android OS. The company may still be throttling feature releases to handicap Google, which it has clashed with recently over data portability, and could be competing with when Google’s social product is eventually released. In the meantime, Facebook for Android users are still a step behind iPhone users, but should take comfort in knowing they’re stil better off than those with Blackberry or Palm devices. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| The Year in Facebook-Powered Shopping Posted: 03 Dec 2010 12:22 PM PST Facebook-powered shopping is becoming more popular according to new statistics released by Facebook. Over half of the 25 largest and 25 fastest growing retail sites have integrated with Facebook. The post-Thanksgiving shopping rush led to significant increases in referral traffic from Facebook, status updates related to retail purchases, and Likes on retail sites. While retailers increase revenue and shoppers get social recommendations, the real winner is Facebook. More shopping within the canvas through storefront Page tabs inspires Pages to advertise with Facebook, while Open Graph-enabled site shopping increases reliance on Facebook.
Independent studies from the last year have indicated that over 86% of U.S. retailers have a Facebook Page, and Facebook is growing its share as a source of traffic to retail sites. Major retail sites such as Amazon, eBay, and TheFind, ecommerce solution provider PayPal, search engine Bing, and group deals providers Groupon and Living Social have integrated with Facebook. Meanwhile Facebook-integrated technology to help retailers is proliferating, with free Page tab application storefront provider Payvment taking $6 million in funding, and micro-incentive system ifeelgoods allowing retailers to reward customers with Facebook Credits.
In the last few days, Bing and Etsy have also unveiled new ways bring friends into the shopping experience. Etsy’s “Gift Ideas for Facebook Friends” pulls a selected friend’s Likes and gives relevant gift suggestions. While very similar to Amazon’s social shopping experience, the oddball handicrafts on Etsy map better to Likes than Amazon’s more standard merchandise. Bing will soon allow users to quickly build a shopping list and share it to Facebook to get the opinions of their friends.
Here are some specific statistics about the success of Black Friday and Cyber Monday for Facebook-powered shopping:
The fact is that users are opening up to the idea of shopping on Facebook, and trusted recommendations from friends on and off-site encourage purchasing. Allowing users to complete purchases on Facebook Pages through storefronts like Payvment reduces the steps between discovery and checkout. Adding Like buttons on to every product on a retail site not only make it easy for customers to generate leads from their network, but allows for granular communication with the audience of each Like button. By making integration lucrative to retailers, Facebook is ingraining itself in the shopping industry. If retailers see results from selling products on Facebook, they’ll pay the social network for ads which drive more users to their Pages. Expanding the presence of the Open Graph across the web positions Facebook well for the future launch of an prospective embeddable advertising product which lets sites take advantage of the same ad targeting as Facebook’s on-site performance advertising system. In these ways, Facebook-powered shopping could play a major role in the future of Facebook’s own monetization. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Games Fill Up This Week’s List of Emerging Facebook Apps Posted: 03 Dec 2010 08:02 AM PST
Frontier Bonuses is a utility for collecting bonuses shared by friends playing FrontierVille, without having to actually visit their wall or your own feed. Its huge growth over the week reveals just how many people are determined to get ahead in Zynga’s Western-themed game. RPGs are the big winner this week, as we point out this morning over on Inside Social Games. Epic Fighters, Mighty Pirates, Puzzle Saga and more fall into the genre, which is itself expanding into many different forms of gameplay. The most unusual of the bunch is Mighty Pirates, but most are worth a look. Portals, or aggregators of casual games, also made a showing, including Karma Games & Avatars and MyGame. Long-time readers will recognize Entrevista Social as the latest variation on the original Entrevista tus Amigos, a Spanish-language friend quiz that now has multiple variations by several developers. No matter which way you cut it, the mechanic is about the same: the app asks you to answer questions about friends, and posts the results to your wall. There are also a couple Italian-language apps rising, La sfida delle città and Città d’Italia, both of which are geography tests for Facebook’s apparently location-obsessed Italian users. Finally, Myspace continues to grow. This isn’t an app, but is instead a count of users who log into MySpace with Facebook Connect, which started a few weeks ago. So far, the number looks pretty positive for MySpace. |
Southwest Airlines’ Places Charity Promo – Southwest Airlines has 
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