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Inside Facebook

Webtrends Brings Drag-and-Drop Interface and Ads API Integration to its App Creation Services

Posted: 07 Dec 2010 06:41 AM PST

Mobile and social analytics provider Webtrends has upgraded its app creation and promotion packages with collaboration functionality, drag-and-drop interface, and integration with its Facebook ads API services. The improvements allow users to design apps without programming, run advertising campaigns with automatic dynamic bid management, and view post click conversion and engagement analytics within the same system. Peter Yared, CEO of Webtrends’ recent full-service and self-service app creator acquisition Transpond, spoke with us about trends in the types of apps the company’s clients have been using.

Webtrends acquired Transpond in August and has integrated its services and technology to offer start-to-finish solutions for launching apps on platforms including Facebook, MySpace, iPhone, Android, and Facebook Connect websites. Yared says that clients of the two separate companies frequently requested the other’s services, so joining the teams seemed logical. Many other companies we’ve profiled recently, including Involver, Context Optional, Vitrue, and Wildfire offer app creation services. However, these services don’t offer the efficiency of marketing spend available through a Facebook ads API tool, or self-service app design which is as easy as with Webtrends.

Previously, Webtrends clients had to use coordinates and pixel counts to position and size design elements when creating apps. The new drag-and-drop interface makes composition similar to designing a Powerpoint presentation. Marketing teams familiar with arranging creative assets to make banner ads will be able to publish applications without the help of engineers.

Webtrends has added a collaboration inviter which allows clients to give additional team members permission to edit an app or view analytics on its performance. Collaborators can’t edit apps concurrently, but the the system works well for dividing initial app creation and post-publishing maintenance responsibilities.

Once apps have been installed on a Facebook Page, released to an app store, or otherwise published, Webtrends can conduct managed spend advertising campaigns to promote the app through its Facebook ads API tool. Targeting parameters and creative elements are combined to create all the possible permutations of an ad. Clients set a budget and specific bid maximums, and Webtrends’ algorithms automatically adjust bid prices to maximize conversions or other desired metrics. Typically, an advertising tool or full-service provider would have to provide conversion tracking pixels to be embedded in the app’s code, but with Webtrends the apps are created with conversion tracking already on board.

Webtrends offers three Social Accelerator Packages. $15,000 buys a single campaign, $30,000 buys multiple campaigns, and $45,000 gets clients set up with multiple apps and a schedule for rotating them through a Facebook Page tab. Each package comes with advertising, of which Webtrends takes 10% of spend, so the $15,000 package is actually $10,000 in app creation and consulting, $4500 to Facebook in advertising, and $500 for Webtrends’ ad fee. While this is a relatively high markup on advertising, clients have the entire custom app creation and optimized marketing process handled within a single system.

Since Webtrends works with clients to find the most appropriate, best performing apps for their campaigns, we asked Yared if he had noticed any trends in what types of apps have been the most successful lately. He says the company was a bit surprised to see a resurgence in popularity and performance of older app types such as badges, especially for non-profits, and this-or-that voting apps. Yared believes that after a period where brands would devote “$150,000 to a big campaign and make really complicated apps that click off into iframes just to justify their spend, clients are going back to basics.” Songs cards which can be posted to walls, web forms, and other low-touch apps are performing significantly better than high-touch, user generated content apps and contests where users upload photos or video.

Yareds advice? “Give something to your fans every two weeks that interests them — keep the content fresh, and keep cycling though apps.”

Loopt Tries to Adapt Around Facebook’s Places With a Richer Interface

Posted: 06 Dec 2010 04:05 PM PST

A very early pioneer in the location-based social networking space, Loopt is adapting to a new reality where Facebook is fast-becoming the central hub for location sharing.

It’s launching a new version of its app today with a simpler interface that better marries its own check-in data with Facebook’s location service, Places.

Loopt was one of the original launch partners for Places in August, and the company followed by integrating it in October.

Think of the new version as a more in-depth way of navigating your friend’s whereabouts than what Facebook currently offers. It seems to be a bet that Loopt can be an interesting interface for location in the same way that companies like Tweetdeck positioned itself as a more high-powered interface for Twitter.

“Facebook is going to be the platform for the Internet,” said Loopt founder Sam Altman. “We can’t compete with these guys head-on but we can use this to make what we do better.”

The homepage has been reduced from a grid of buttons to just five. Loopt continues to offer a full range of ways to share your location — from always-on tracking for a special group of close friends you choose to check-ins for your broader social network.

It also has a map view of where your friends are, which Facebook has yet to build. It supports location text messages, called Pings, that lower the cost of requesting and pushing information about your whereabouts to friends.

On top of that, it lets you see your friend’s favorite places based on their check-in history, which Facebook doesn’t do. The main news feed also shows a mix of media like photo check-ins and maps.

The question is will these additional features be enough for it keep its users actively engaged.

As a company, one of Loopt’s weaknesses is that it was too early to market. It raised funding starting in 2005, before the iPhone and the emergence of Apple’s app store, which drastically lowered the cost of acquiring new users. Before the app store, time-consuming deals with carriers were necessary to get in front of consumers. Those early disadvantages later allowed companies like Foursquare to eclipse Loopt in media attention and growth pace last year.

However, Foursquare now finds itself in a similar position after it spurned talks with Facebook to pursue an independent path and raise $20 million from investors including Andreessen Horowitz. Today it also carries the burden of high investor expectations paired with Facebook’s ability to cannibalize its core utility.

Other players in the space like Scvngr and Booyah, which raised funding from Facebook investor Accel Partners, are more differentiated with richer gameplay.

Loopt’s changes are a step in the right direction, but may not be enough.

ThinkEquity Says It Advised Peanut Labs Deal

Posted: 06 Dec 2010 03:15 PM PST

A collection of big-name banks and boutique investment firms compete across Silicon Valley to provide financial advice to client companies planning to sell themselves, raise money, or buy. They normally try to stay out of the public eye to preserve trust and focus with clients. And in social gaming, they’ve been especially quiet.

However, ThinkEquity today disclosed that it had advised Peanut Labs in its acquisition earlier this fall by Research Now. After starting out as Xuqa, a social network, Peanut Labs has been a provider of surveys and other offers for social application developers on Facebook and online games for the last couple of years. ThinkEquity is an investment bank based in San Francisco.

We’ve previously heard that JP Morgan may have worked on Playfish’s sale to Electronic Arts last year, and that Allen & Co has advised Zynga on its various funding rounds (hiring managing director David Wehner in July to be its new chief financial officer). We’ve also heard from industry sources that Allen & Co has worked with other developers, as has Code Advisors and George Boutros from Frank Quattrone’s Qatalyst Partners.

Have any more to share on the topic? Email us here: eric (at) insidenetwork (dot) com.

Developer Roadmap Update: November Rollup Migration Coming December 12

Posted: 06 Dec 2010 12:22 PM PST

Facebook has been pushing back a set of updates to its graph API since last month, but according to a developer update from late last week, it’s happening this coming Sunday, the 12th.

The changes are for the most part small (we’ve covered them in more detail when they were announced). Here they are:

  • Graph API: The fan_count attribute on the Page object will be renamed to likes.
  • Graph API: The likes connection on the Post object will include both the count and the users that have liked the object.
  • Graph API: All id fields returned by POST calls will be typed as strings.
  • Graph API: For events, start_time and end_time will use UTC time rather than in Pacific time. This address a common (and vocal) requested from the community.
  • FQL: The networks field in privacy table will be ‘ALL_NETWORKS’ instead of ’1′ if an object is shared for all of user’s networks.

New Reports, More Data at Inside Facebook Gold

Posted: 06 Dec 2010 10:30 AM PST

We're proud to announce major revisions and improvements for the December 2010 edition of Inside Facebook Gold, our comprehensive business intelligence service providing data and analysis on Facebook.

Facebook is today the foundation of a vibrant, dynamic startup ecosystem, and yet it remains a private company that reveals little on its own performance and growth, and still less on risks and new opportunities facing related businesses. Operating effectively on Facebook comes from using intelligent and prescient analysis on the company’s global audience growth, demographic shifts, and business dealflow to make key decisions.

We believe an analyst's valuable time is poorly spent on tedious, repetitive and non-systematic data collection and synthesis. Top analysts’ real work is in analysis specific to their businesses.

Inside Facebook Gold presents comprehensive business intelligence on the Facebook ecosystem for top analysts whose responsibility is to understand and interpret opportunities, not to hunt down data.

Inside Facebook Gold is a suite of data and analysis services, including:

  • Global Data Feed Service, a regular, up-to-date data csv covering Facebook audience size, demographics, advertising rates, and language use.
  • Facebook Monthly Growth Report, a detailed analytical review of audience change by country markets, and demographic and linguistic groups, with focused reporting on one key region each month.
  • Facebook Global Monitor, 100 pages of leaderboards and charts covering audience change in 160 Facebook country markets.
  • DealWatch, a summary and analysis of all the funding and acquisition events, major hires, and partnerships that have taken place in the Facebook business ecosystem, and in social games and payments.

December 2010 intelligence suite is available now at Inside Facebook Gold.

Facebook Profile Redesign Will Coax More Data From Users: An In-Depth Review

Posted: 06 Dec 2010 08:18 AM PST

Facebook has released a major redesign of the user profile which makes more profile info, photos, and friends immediately visible. A single panel navigation system, image-accompanied Likes, Friendship Page previews, and the ability to tag friends in your work, school, and sports info are also new. While some features have been stripped out, profiles are now much more visually compelling. By increasing the prominence of biographical information and connections, Facebook has found a natural way to get users to share more.

The last profile redesign in mid-2008 merged the wall and activity feed and gave users the content publisher. Facebook has since split the publisher into tabs for different content types, increased the number of ads per page to four, and removed profile boxes and application tabs. The recently launched Friendship Page which displays mutual content and connections of two users, and the conversion of static interests into connections from f8 paved the way for the new design.

Opt-in Rollout

Facebook is currently pushing out the profile redesign through an opt-in system which should diffuse user protests. When visiting the profile of a friend who has upgraded, users are shown an invitation to “Get the New Profile”. Alternatively they can visit the new profile about page where they can view a video or screenshots explaining the changes. A facepile of friends who’ve upgraded provides a social recommendation for switching. Users can click to implement the redesign —  changing their own profile and making the profiles of their friends appear redesigned as well. From there, users are brought to their upgraded profile and given the option to take a tour of the changes. Once a user has upgraded, there doesn’t appear to be way to go back to the the old design.

New Features

Profile Info Summary

The top of a user’s profile shows a Profile Info Summary, which includes what Facebook says are “the kinds of conversation starters you share with people you've just met or exchange with old friends as you get reacquainted.” A user’s job position and employer, concentration and university, current city, relationship and with who, languages spoken, hometown, and birthday are all listed front and center.

Clicking the links of schools or workplaces opens the corresponding Community Page, unless it has been claimed and merged into an official Page. This means the Profile Info Summary won’t always translate into increased Page discoverability.

Many of the included characteristics can be targeted through the performance advertising system. It’s therefore in Facebook’s interest for users to provide and keep current this information. Prompts for users to enter absent information and the the increased visibility of these fields to a user and their friends should ensure this. Utility applications, especially recruiting apps such as BranchOut could also benefit from increased profile info accuracy.

This new section emphasizes the more stable elements of a person’s identity. This gives a more thorough understanding a user than the old design which gave more prominence to recent actions taken on Facebook. A user’s latest status update no longer appears at the top of their profile, making it more difficult to determine their current mood or activity.

Recently Tagged Photos

Recently Tagged Photos shows the five most recent photos a user was tagged in. Clicking one of the photos opens the light box view of the tagged photos album. This change makes photos other than a user’s profile picture immediately visible, providing a more balanced, long term look at that person’s identity.

In the tour of the redesign, Facebook stresses in bold that “privacy settings have not changed. Only people you’ve allowed to view photos you’re tagged in will see these photos.”

Users can click an ‘x’ in the top right corner of their own Recently Tagged Photos to hide that photo from the feature. Hidden photos are still visible within albums and the Photos tab. Facebook recently began allowing photo reordering within albums, but not for tagged photos. The Recently Tagged Photos hiding feature gives users more control over the first impression they give visitors to their profiles. Users should be aware that since tagged photos are subject to the uploader and their own privacy settings, their friends might not all see the same five photos.

Combined Navigation Panel

The links to navigate between a user’s wall, info, and photos which were previously in the top center of the profile have been moved to a panel below the profile picture. The combined navigation panel does centralize links, but also removes functionality and buries direct links to certain features and off-Facebook sites.

A user’s Questions and Notes, which could be optionally added as profile tabs, are also listed here in the navigation panel. There’s also new link to a dedicated “Friends” page, which replaces the “See All” button and pop up friends list from the old design. The old text links beneath the profile picture to message or a poke a user are now more visible buttons in the top right corner. A “Suggest Friends” button also appear in the top right corner of the profiles of users with few friends.

Gone are sections beneath the profile picture displaying a user’s most recently updated photo albums and shared Links. The About Me section, Likes, and a user’s website URLs have been moved to a new location within the Info navigation link. This decreases the prominence of explicit self expression, and reduces the likelihood that a user’s friends follow their links to blogs or profiles on other web services.

Users could previously highlight their upcoming Events, shared Links, and uploaded Videos by creating profile tabs for those categories. There appears to be no way to view all of a friend’s RSVPs or shared Links in the redesign. The link to a user’s tagged videos that used to be below the profile picture has been removed, and the only way to view these or their other uploaded videos is through links obscured inside the Photos navigation link.

Featured Relationships

Within the Relationships section of the profile editor, users can designate friends lists and Groups as their “Featured Relationships”. Up to three members from each selected list and Group plus ten people from the entire set of Friends appear beneath the combined navigation panel.

Users can create a new list or reorder their Featured Relationships from the profile editor. Friend Lists are private, but any Friend List a user adds to their Featured Relationships can be seen by anyone who can see their total set of friends.

Any Group without the “Secret” privacy setting can be added to Featured Relationships, which could be an interesting way of increasing discoverability of Groups. For instance, I could add my open SF Socialites Group to my Featured Relationships if I wanted people to request to join.

If users edit their romantic relationship status to connect them to a significant other such as their wife, fiancé, or boyfriend, this automatically creates a section a the top of the Featured Relationships chain. The section reads “[type of relationship] [to/with] [significant other's name]“, or “Married to Sarah Bryant” for instance. This relationship status section can not be moved down the pane. By listing relationship status in both the Profile Info Summary and Featured Relationships, this information prominence has been significantly increased, which could prompt more users to confirm their real life romances on Facebook, which in turn helps advertisers target ads and Facebook sort the news feed.

If users add relationships with family members, such as two users confirming that they are brothers, this automatically creates a “Family” section at the bottom of the Featured Relationships pane of the profile. This does not create a traditional Friend List, since users can’t set “Family” as a distribution parameter for status updates or privacy settings, but they can reorder it the same way as other Friends Lists or Groups added to Featured Relationships. Family members were shown as text links at the top of the old Info tab of the profile, so it’s unclear how the added image and relocation to the bottom left of the primary profile view will affect the frequency with which users list family relationships.

Featured Relationships is similar to MySpace’s “Top 8″ feature which lets users show off their best friends. While useful for learning about who are the important people in someone’s life, Featured Relationships could cause drama for users who might be guilted or coerced into adding family members, significant others, or other friends.

Enhanced Profile Info

A user’s profile information can be augmented with descriptions and people they shared those experiences with. For instance, users can list projects they’ve worked on and when, tag friends that also worked on that project, and add descriptions of the projects within their employer info, or list classes they had in college or high school and tag friends who were classmates.

When a user is tagged in the profile info of someone else, the listing they were tagged in automatically appears in their profile and they receive a notification. Similar to photos, tags are opt out, meaning there is potential for users to abuse the feature by creating false tags of their friends. The ability to alter a friend’s work info may aggravate some Facebook users, since there isn’t a privacy control to prevent this. Facebook should consider allowing users to disable friends tagging them in profile info, similar to how Places tags by friends can be disabled.

There are also new “Sports” and “Philosophy” categories in the profile editor. Users can list sports they play, add a description, and tag friends they play with. There are also special sections for adding Likes of sports teams and athletes within Sports, and “People Who Inspire You” within philosophy. Teams, athletes, and people weren’t previously distinguished from the rest of a user’s uncategorized Likes.

The Philosophy and Sports sections are now the most prominent sets of Likes in a user’s profile, appearing above the “Arts & Entertainment” and “Activities and Interests” section. The change significantly improves discoverability for sports and people Pages and Open Graph objects. Some of these new profile info categories will likely become targetable by advertisers. Sporting goods manufacturers and retailers should be eager to aim ads according to what sports users play.

Visual Interests

Likes of certain Page and Open Graph object types now have their links accompanied with pictures in the Interests section of a user’s profile info. One row of five photos is shown for each category, and they can be expanded to show photos of all the Likes in that category. Pages having an attention-grabbing picture is now more important to discoverability.

The order in which the different Page categories appear in profiles has changed. Activities and Interests have been moved from the top of the list of Likes to the bottom, reducing their discoverability. Pages and Open Graph objects without type tags or which don’t fall into one of these eleven categories still appear folded up within a “Show Other Pages” link, and don’t show pictures when unfolded.

Friendship Page Previews

A preview of the Likes and connections a user has in common with a friend is shown at the top of the right sidebar of that friend’s profile. The preview includes a link to the full Friendship Page for the two users, which was located beneath a friend’s profile picture in the old design.

The preview can include up to two photos both users are tagged in, a facepile of up to seven mutual friends, the total number of mutual friends, Groups both users are members of, Events both are attending, and mutual Likes for different categories.

Conclusion

The profile redesign will help users learn more about their friends, project a more balanced impression of themselves, and remember to keep their own information up-to-date. However, the removal of the Events and Links profile sections are unfortunate and don’t seem necessary. Overall, Facebook has succeeded in making profiles more fun and informative to browse.

Pages as a whole will be easier to discover. Celebrities, politicians, sports teams, and athletes will gain the most from the redesign, whereas Activities and Interests such as websites, small businesses, and media outlets have either gained little or are slightly worse off. We’ll track the impact of the redesign on the growth of Pages in these categories over the coming months. Advertisers will have more information to target as users fill out their profiles more completely and discover more Pages.

Facebook has found a way to encourage users to provide valuable information and improve the accuracy of their existing data set. While its unclear exactly what some of the more precise data could be used for, the profile redesign strengthens Facebook’s positions as both a communication medium and a record of its users’ lives.

BandPage Cruises Up This Week’s List of Fastest-Growing Games by MAU

Posted: 06 Dec 2010 08:10 AM PST

While the old version of Phrases is quickly losing users, Phrases (new), the revamped version, is keeping developer Takeoff Monkey’s numbers fairly steady. But neither app is the most interesting story on this week’s AppData list of fastest-growing Facebook games by monthly active users. That would be BandPage by RootMusic, which gained 1.8 million new MAU in the week period.

The reason for such a sharp increase, though, is in part due to a Facebook Insights bug that resulted in traffic to Page applications temporarily not appearing. See our coverage last week for more details.

Top Gainers This Week
Name MAU Gain Gain,%
1. Phrases (new) 16,725,006 +2,560,643 +18%
2. BandPage by RootMusic 11,579,444 +1,785,833 +18%
3. Birthday Calendar 1,750,294 +1,749,507 +222,301%
4. Tag Friends 5,872,541 +1,609,116 +38%
5. JibJab 3,271,035 +1,043,010 +47%
6. phrases 4 fun 2,915,827 +987,441 +51%
7. Badoo 4,349,161 +944,842 +28%
8. Vegas City 3,603,126 +856,191 +31%
9. Game of Truth 1,979,356 +689,544 +53%
10. City of Wonder 7,059,673 +615,833 +10%
11. Frontier Bonuses 1,007,078 +610,316 +154%
12. FrontierVille 29,872,423 +601,010 +2%
13. Island God 2,074,902 +559,441 +37%
14. Bar World 1,180,819 +545,008 +86%
15. Hollywood City 3,634,751 +527,276 +17%
16. Epic Fighters 1,214,743 +493,369 +68%
17. Welcome Tab for pages 2,622,623 +466,965 +22%
18. Social Fun 6,177,296 +463,873 +8%
19. Mighty Pirates 1,026,557 +445,283 +77%
20. Farm Bonuses 444,768 +388,336 +688%

BandPage is emerging as the winner of the competition to create a full-featured Page app for bands on Facebook. At the rate BandPage is growing, the app could eventually rival MySpace, which has held onto bands as one of its specialties that keeps users coming back.

Birthday Calendar sounds like the typical important date reminder app, but it’s actually a bit more; with it, you can generate a full year’s calendar showing the birthday of every friend in your network. The downside is that Calendar’s growth comes from tagging every one of your friends that it can in the generated calendar photos, a fantastically spammy technique that brought in all 1.7 million users in about five days.

Finally, Badoo has replaced Are You Interested? as Facebook’s growing Hot-or-Not style dating app, picking up almost a million users over the week. With such impressive growth stats, it’s surprising that more apps of this type aren’t on Facebook.

tirsdag den 7. december 2010 at 07.28