Inside Facebook
Inside Facebook |
- Facebook Roundup: DC, Fellowships, Sandberg, Video, Places, Messaging and Lookout
- Badoo’s Dating App Sees Big New Surge on Facebook
- Likes and Christmas Greetings Appear on This Week’s List of Emerging Facebook Apps
| Facebook Roundup: DC, Fellowships, Sandberg, Video, Places, Messaging and Lookout Posted: 24 Dec 2010 05:41 PM PST Facebook Makes DC Communications Hire – As we previously wrote, Facebook was looking to fill an Associate Manager for Policy Communications. Politico reports that Brooke Oberwetter was selected for the position, will begin in January and work under Andrew Noyes. She previously worked for the Competitive Enterprise Institute and USTelecom Association.
Facebook Second in Video Traffic - A report from Brightcove, Inc. and TubeMogul, Inc. found that Facebook is behind only Google in the number of video referrals. Facebook accounted for 9.6% of all referrals. Facebook Expands Ph.D Fellowship Program – As we reported earlier this year, Facebook created a fellowship program for Ph.D candidates. This week the company announced it was expanding the program to include more areas of research: Computational advertising, fault tolerance and human-computer interaction, for example. This program will also be open international students studying in the U.S. and a total of five slots will be made available. Applications are due at the end of February.
Japan Facebook Users Post Blood Type - Facebook users in Japan may post their blood type, according to an interesting global map by Time magazine. This is the only regional variation of Facebook. The map also notes that Facebook is set to hit 1 billion users in August of 2012. Facebook Analyzes U.S. Status Updates - The Facebook Data team wrote an interesting blog this week about what the content in U.S. users' status updates is, how it impacts Likes and comments and how positivity and negativity affect these outcomes. Overall it seems that positive updates received more feedback, popular topics include music and sports and younger people swear more and write of more negative emotions.
Facebook to Use HBase For Messaging System – Facebook needed a new way to handle the large amount of data that would come in with its new messaging system and finally decided to go with HBase.
Facebook IPO Could Boost California Economy – In an interesting post, Bloomberg's Paul Kedrosky notes that California's economy is set up such that when personal incomes rise, the economy does well. Meaning that, as Facebook readies to go public, the capital gains associated with stock option-related tax revenues could help the state's $18 billion deficit. Lookout Raises $19.5M – Smartphone security company Lookout just raised $19.5 million in Series C funding, brining its total to $36 million. This round was led by Index Ventures, with Accel Partners and Khosla Ventures.
The Gifts Project Raises $1M - The Gifts Project, an Israeli startup allowing groups of people to purchase a gift for someone, raised $1 million this week in a round led by Gemini Israel Funds. The startup previously took seed investment from Dr. Yossi Vardi. Facebook-Like Tumblr Theme - Gabrielle Wee created a Tumblr theme that looks like a Facebook profile. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Badoo’s Dating App Sees Big New Surge on Facebook Posted: 24 Dec 2010 10:00 AM PST Badoo has been around for years, mostly as a slickly-designed dating social network site, but it introduced a Facebook app version in October, and it’s recently been challenging many larger dating competitors. The app has had a huge December, growing from 3.19 million monthly active users and 365,000 daily active users a month ago to 10.8 million MAU and 1.34 million DAU today — making it the second-largest dating title by MAU and the largest by DAU on Facebook, according to our AppData tracking service. The company’s site claims upwards of 90 million members total, and also utilizes a Facebook Connect integration that works with its Facebook app. Using Connect or the app, a user automatically is fitted with a profile that includes their name, age, location, sex and profile photos.
Then, you’re presented with photos and basic profile information of potential dates, apparently drawn from Badoo’s database not Facebook. You have the choice to click "Yes" or "No" to meet them. But in order to actually meet these people, you must pay a small fee to Badoo through the web site. Like other dating apps, it also includes a virtual currency system that can give you access to special features, as well as a friend quiz section that helps generate viral growth by posting to your friends walls. We recently reported that Badoo made our list of fastest-growing Facebook applications by DAUs last week. As we stated then, probably part of this growth is because of a recent study the company completed with the world's best pick-up lines; this may have contributed to its recent growth. Another factor may be, as Facebook reported earlier this year, people tend to break up a few weeks before Christmas. So, maybe Badoo's being in the news, coupled with recent breakups has helped the company take advantage of a perfect storm of growth opportunity? Or maybe it’s advertising. Or maybe it’s the aggressive quiz that’s part of the app — it lists amusing, highly personal questions about one’s Facebook friends, and comes with a pre-filled box that posts to their wall if you click on an answer, as seen below.
We’ll be tracking the app’s traffic versus competitors in the coming year. Stay tuned. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Likes and Christmas Greetings Appear on This Week’s List of Emerging Facebook Apps Posted: 24 Dec 2010 08:09 AM PST
The seasonal apps include ☻ ♥ ChristmaS BesT WisheS to YoU ♥☻, ·٠•●★●·Merry Christmas,Dear Friend ★ Blessings·● and Snowball Smack!. As you can see, developers have figured out that having the loudest name possible is important for most season’s greetings apps. Like This Like This is an exact repeat of an app that we’ve seen several times, which has users vote through Likes on comments that they think are funny or original. Famous Status Update is pretty similar. Some of the apps lower down on the list are a bit more interesting, including The oldest user, which compares the ages of people using the app but is actually in French, and O-Meter App Factory, which is a variation on create your own quiz apps, available in both English and Spanish. The games are probably the most interesting apps on the list, headed up by FarmVille 中文版, which is a Chinese-language version and update of the FarmVille. We cover it over on Inside Social Games this morning, along with CityVille passing the original FarmVille in size.
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