Inside Facebook
Inside Facebook |
- Facebook to Use Facial Recognition to Provide Photo Tag Suggestions
- Wowd Launches Web Version of its Facebook News Feed Client
- Facebook’s Zuckerberg Named Time Person of the Year — New Stats Emerge
- Highlights This Week from the Inside Network Job Board: Ubisoft, Pileated Pictures, & More
- Facebook’s Instant Personalization Improves Suggestions on Clicker Online TV Recommendations
- Phrases Makes a Full Comeback on This Week’s List of Fastest-Growing Facebook Apps by DAU
| Facebook to Use Facial Recognition to Provide Photo Tag Suggestions Posted: 15 Dec 2010 05:59 PM PST Facebook has announced a new photo tag suggestions feature that utilizes facial recognition technology. When users upload photos, faces which match ones tagged in their existing photos will show a suggestion of who to tag. Similar photos are grouped for easy tagging. Users can opt out of being identified by the facial recognition software in their privacy settings. The update, rolled out in the U.S. over the next few weeks, could lead users to be tagged in photos much more frequently. It also brings Facebook up to speed with other photo editing tools including iPhoto, which can already create Facebook tags through facial recognition.
Facebook has long been the most popular photo sharing service in the world, and it is this core app which drives time on-site and growth. Facebook began highlighting faces to assist tagging in July, while third-party apps sought to help users find untagged photos of themselves through facial recognition software. The Photos product received a major upgrade in September, with the additions of high resolution photo uploads, an in-line light box viewing mode, and bulk tagging. When users upload photos, they are brought to a Tag Your Friends page. Here, users see a dialogue which explains that their photos have been grouped and names of friends have been suggested. Grouping photos which look similar and therefore likely contain the same friends makes it easier to tag multiple photos. Photo tag suggestions appear in a blue box beneath the recognized photo. It appears that users must opt out of suggested tags, which allows for quick saving of tags if a user thinks they are accurate.
Users who receive the new feature will also see a new “Suggest photos of me to friends” privacy setting within the “Customize settings” link. When disabled, users won’t appear in suggestions, which will lower the chances of them being tagged. Facebook explains that the update means “you’re more likely to know right away when friends post photos.” Really, this will reduce the likelihood that a user could be identified in a photo of them which they never knew about since they weren’t tagged and notified. Most importantly, photo tag suggestions may significantly increase the number of photos users get tagged in, increasing interconnections, and further cementing Facebook as the keeper of our memories. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Wowd Launches Web Version of its Facebook News Feed Client Posted: 15 Dec 2010 01:00 PM PST Wowd, previously a Facebook news feed desktop client, today launches a web version of its free service. The company aims to reduce information overload due to filter failure by automatically generating smart feeds of the updates of clusters of a user’s friends. However, while custom feeds, smart feeds, and news feed search capabilities offer some additional value, most users will likely still prefer using Facebook.com.
Many startups have attempted to provide a better way of browsing Facebook this year. The RockMelt social internet browser found some early praise, but anecdotal evidence suggests the novelty has worn off and users are returning to their standard web browsers. Flipboard offers an elegant reading experience but is only available for iPad, and Paper.li makes Facebook content look like Twitter posts but doesn’t update in real time. PostPost, a custom socially curated newspaper which launched last week, is an efficient way to consume links and videos posted by friends. It filters out personal content including status updates, though, showing it’s not trying to replace Facebook canvas. Wowd added Facebook news feed browsing to its desktop software in August. The integration focused on feed searches which could be turned into custom streams. It also helped conceal application stories — something Facebook now handles for non-gamers. While compelling for some, requiring users to download and install software created a lot of friction, leading to only 500,000 total users and 70,000 daily active users. The new web version aims to eliminate this friction and provide a more powerful, though less interconnected, way to consume posts by friends. When users visit the Wowd site and permit access to their accounts, they’re brought to a home page which looks similar to their Facebook news feed. However, Facebook only allows API access to the posts of a user’s friends, not the news feed algorithm EdgeRank which determines their prominence in the feeds. Wowd has developed its own Top Now algorithm, which is more similar to Google’s PageRank in that it takes into account multiple degrees of connectivity. This means a post by a friend who you rarely interact with, but with whom your closest friends heavily interact, will have greater prominence in Wowd’s Top Now than in the Facebook news feed. Top Now is not as good at determining the most compelling posts, though. It regularly displays random wall posts or posts with few Likes or comments, while Facebook pulls up links with healthy discussions. Also, since Wowd does not offer other core Facebook apps which are often linked to in feed posts, users will have follow links to Facebook.com to see an uploaded photo or RSVP to Events.
The web version of Wowd retains the time period feeds (Top in 7 days…), feed search, custom feeds, and tag clouds, but strips out some features including browsing history which require the desktop software. New are Smart Feeds — auto-generated feeds of posts by different clusters in your network. For instance, Wowd created Smart Feeds for my San Francisco friends and my people from freshman dorm. The feature aims to one-up the manually started, often forgotten friend lists feature on Facebook.
Wowd CEO Mark Drummond says that due to information overload Facebook users are “past the point where the news feed feels empowering, and they start to feel squashed by updates”. Wowd therefore focuses on custom feeds and search. In the future, the service aims to also help filter Twitter and LinkedIn feeds, and release a mobile app for “info snacking”. Though there are specific use cases for Wowd, personal Facebook updates weren’t meant to be consumed in a feature vacuum. When users click through to Facebook to view a photo or other core app, they’re not likely to return. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Facebook’s Zuckerberg Named Time Person of the Year — New Stats Emerge Posted: 15 Dec 2010 12:20 PM PST
Most of the article is a detailed take on how Zuckerberg is leading Facebook today, plus background on his life and the company’s growth. But the article also has a couple apparently new, and interesting, statistics. One is that the company now has 550 million users. The other is that it is growing by around 700,000 new users per day. Facebook isn’t commenting on the new numbers. Its official stats page still shows the 500 million user mark from when it announced that number in July and it doesn’t currently provide any daily growth stats. So Time appears to have done its own calculations to get the new results — the numbers look about right. Based on the country data in our Inside Facebook Gold service, Facebook had 576 million monthly active users by the start of December. Two third-party data services indicate similarly: ComScore most recently showed 634 million monthly unique visitors worldwide in October; Google Ad planner was updated in the last couple of weeks to show 590 million. Therefore, Time is likely a little behind on that number, but in the ballpark. In terms of daily growth rate, 700,000 new users per day since the July announcement implies around 85 million new users in total by today — meaning something like 585 million total, which sounds right. All of these numbers should be read as estimates to triangulate from, not as facts. The trend, though, seems to show that Facebook is not yet slowing down. Platform Growth Following a bunch of other updates to its official stats page last week, Facebook has also quietly made another one today. “More than 2.5 million developers and partners from more than 190 countries build with Facebook Platform,” the page says today. It previously said one million did. That’s a huge jump, albeit not surprising to us or our readers. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Highlights This Week from the Inside Network Job Board: Ubisoft, Pileated Pictures, & More Posted: 15 Dec 2010 11:16 AM 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 Ubisoft, Pileated Pictures, Villain and NaturalMotion.
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. 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’s Instant Personalization Improves Suggestions on Clicker Online TV Recommendations Posted: 15 Dec 2010 10:00 AM PST Today, Facebook unveils instant personalization for online television recommendations engine Clicker. When you visit the site while logged in to Facebook, you’ll see suggestions of things to watch based on your Likes and the Likes of friends. The instant personalization pulls relatively benign data, namely your publicly available basic information, as well as your friend list, the interests of friends, and any info you make available to everyone, such as your own interests. All sharing options default to opt-in, preventing surprise wall posts. The integration successfully removes the obstacle between users and significantly improved recommendations by automatically providing information users probably would have authorized access to anyways.
Facebook has slowed down the roll out of instant personalization which began at f8 but encountered some initial backlash and minor security issues. It’s only offering the integration to “great websites that offer naturally social experiences”, most recently Microsoft’s Bing search engine, Scribd and Flixster’s Rotten Tomatoes film reviews site. At the Bing instant personalization launch, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg defended the program, explaining that only what you share with everyone is available to partner sites. He asked “Anyone can go to your profile and view your public information, why shouldn't applications be able to do that to give you an awesome experience?” Clicker makes a sensible choice for instant personalization, because since it indexes so much content — 1 million TV episodes, 30,000 movies, and 90,000 music videos — information about user preferences is necessary for it to provide accurate recommendations. Clicker was founded in 2009 and has taken $19 million in funding from investors including Jafco Ventures, Benchmark Capital, and Redpoint Ventures. It released social features including asynchronous friend following as well as a mobile app in July. As with all instant personalization integrations, Clicker displays a notification of its data access near the top of the home page the first few times you visit, offering options to learn more or disable instant personalization. This notification isn’t at the very top , and instead blends into the site’s design, so you could miss it. However, Clicker always shows whether you’re connected through your Facebook account and provides the option to log out in a prominent blue box in the top right corner.
The main area of the home page is filled with video recommendations displaying the pictures of friends who Like that content, or your Likes of similar content. Clicker suggests music videos by artists many of your friends Like, which is an easy way to discover content you might not have explicitly searched for on a TV content site. When I visited Clicker, I saw recommendations of new episodes of my favorite cartoons on Hulu and Amazon VOD, while without instant personalization, I was suggested episodes of reality TV shows which are generally popular but which my friends and I hate.
Within the profile page, you’ll see that your Likes have been imported and mapped to shows, movies, and musicians on Clicker. You’ll have also automatically followed any of your Facebook friends, populating your Recent History feed with their added interests, dislikes, playlist additions, and more which you can comment on or respond to with predefined buttons including “Awesome!”, and “Meh”. This relieves you from having to use the Facebook contact importer to start discussions.
The Sharing tab of the profile settings lets you opt into posting Clicker activity to Facebook and Twitter, while the Privacy tab lets you make your Clicker account private. To disable instant personalization from within Facebook, you have to go to your Privacy Settings and either change what you share with everyone, or go to Applications and Settings and opt out of instant personalization entirely.
Overall, instant personalization works well with Clicker. The experience is much better, privacy implications are low, and the partnership brings exposure to a quality website. While critics will look for something to harp on, when used in a controlled manner with reliable partners, instant personalization helps users by following Facebook’s stated goal — making the default social. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Phrases Makes a Full Comeback on This Week’s List of Fastest-Growing Facebook Apps by DAU Posted: 15 Dec 2010 08:11 AM PST
As we note this morning over on Inside Social Games, several of these apps are new and growing rapidly, which creates a prematurely inflated view of DAU. CityVille’s actual gain of over six million DAU is impressive enough, though. Phrases is just as interesting. The app has mostly recovered from a dip that was likely produced by its being blocked in the United States, coming close to its previous highs. If it keeps growing, it could easily become Facebook’s largest app by monthly active users again, though in terms of DAU it has no chance against FarmVille, the current leader. As you can see for yourself, Phrases is joined by Phrases (new), which is also by developer Takeoff Monkey. Combined, the two nearly identical quiz and quote apps have a total of almost nine million DAU, all among international users. Zuma Blitz, at number four, is a new Popcap casual game that’s worth a try, if you’re into arcade action. It’s followed by Causes, which is enjoying a short-term spike in growth.
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Wikileaks’ Julian Assange may have been the people’s choice for Time Magazine’s Person of the Year award, but as the publication’s 
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