Inside Facebook
Inside Facebook |
- Pixable’s Photofeed App Is the Best Way to Discover and Browse Facebook Photos
- Facebook Allows Users to Upgrade to the New Messages Product, Why You Should
- Facebook Rolls Out December 2010 Profile Redesign to All Users
- Featured Facebook Campaigns: Carl’s Jr., Hardee’s, Schweppes and Adam Lambert
- Games, Dating and Marketplace Do Well on This Week’s List of Fastest-Growing Facebook Apps by MAU
| Pixable’s Photofeed App Is the Best Way to Discover and Browse Facebook Photos Posted: 11 Jan 2011 05:00 AM PST Today, startup Pixable launches its addictive photo discovery and consumption Facebook app Photofeed. It arranges all the photos shared by your Facebook friends into a highly relevant stream based on Likes, comments, and tags. Photofeed’s recommendation engine produces a more enjoyable browsing experience than Facebook’s native Photos app, and could become 2011′s breakout application.
Founded in 2009 by two MIT business school graduates, the company developed apps that let users share mosaics and video slideshows of photos before concentrating on the bigger problem of improving photo consumption. The seventeen-person, eleven engineer team has secured $2.5 million in funding from Highland Capital to turn the 60 billion photos uploaded to Facebook a year into a photo browsing destination. Photofeed provides instant gratification by dropping the news articles present in content repurposing apps like PostPost and Flipboard, and integrating content supplied by photo sharing apps like Instagram and PicPlz. While Facebook is good at displaying the latest content, the average user has access to tens or hundreds of thousands of photos and Photofeed is the way to discover the best of them. Pixable gracefully onboards new users by hiding deeper features and immediately showing them the most compelling photos from their network via the “Popular of the week” category, and later through categories such as “Best of 2010″. An overlaid tutorial can be brought up on command to teach users how they can scroll through photos, leave feedback, and see who’s tagged. Large arrow buttons that only appear when hovered over offer an intuitive and unobtrusive navigation system.
To bolster retention, users can follow their friends and be notified via email when they upload new photos, but to preserve the anonymous browsing experience of Facebook, users can choose whether they want that friend notified that they’re being followed. These sharing and reengagement tactics are apparently quite effective, as Photofeed’s beta reportedly grew from a few thousand to 100,000 users in two weeks, foreshadowing its potential explosion in popularity. Pixable’s CEO and cofounder Inaki Berenguer believes the company’s biggest challenge will be maintaining the app’s swift navigation as demand surges. Berenguer says there’s no monetization model such as ads, printed products, or premium services in the roadmap. “The problem is so huge, our goal is to build a massive audience, 10 or 20 million, and then we’ll figure it out.”
Pixable Photofeed is a joy to use because it doesn’t let feature creep obscure the core value of the app. With so much industry concentration on how we take photos, it’s surprising to think no one else would translate the Pandora model into a way to consume them. By creating what is essentially a news feed dedicated to photo browsing, Pixable may be able to redirect the audience of the world’s most popular photo service. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Facebook Allows Users to Upgrade to the New Messages Product, Why You Should Posted: 10 Jan 2011 01:43 PM PST Some users are seeing a prompt when they visit their Facebook Messages inbox allowing them to upgrade to the New Messages product launched in closed beta in November. The product automatically filters non-essential communications into an Other folder, allowing the main inbox to show only important messages. It also routes sent messages to whichever device or interface Facebook deems is the most convenient for the recipient, whether that’s Chat, Messages, SMS, or email. While initially only available to press and an early tester-base, it appears all users will soon be able to upgrade to New Messages.
At the product’s launch event, CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained that New Messages was built to facilitate modern communication which is simple, immediate, lightweight, and personal like SMS and instant messaging, opposed to more formal, asynchronous email. Though users get an @facebook.com email address, Facebook doesn’t expect users to shift things like payment receipts and newsletters there. Instead, the product reduces noise, eases cross-interface conversation, and creates a more comprehensive record of the communication users already perform. Users who don’t see the prompt to upgrade on their inbox can visit the New Messages about page to request an invitation. We expect a full rollout to occur in the next month or so, similar to how the profile redesign is now being pushed to all users.
The best part about New Messages is how it brings Chat into threaded, searchable conversation history. If someone sends you Message, but you’re online, you’ll see it as a Chat. If you send them back a Chat and they’ve already logged off, it will be routed to their New Messages inbox, and shown in the same thread as your previous Chat. This means you don’t have to worry about conversations breaking down because one person changed the interface through which they were communicating. Or if you accidentally close your last Facebook web interface window or head out the door, you’ll still be able to access those Chats from your phone in the form of Messages.
This system is similar to the interplay of Gchat and Gmail, and its adoption could pull users away from Google who use that company’s product for their reliability of delivery. The New Messages product also separates conversations by people rather than by interface, between which the lines are blurring as users increasingly use Chat, email, and Facebook Messages from their mobile device as well as the web. Other useful features of New Messages include forwarding and attachment support, and a one-click “Mark as Read/Unread” option. The main problem with New Messages at present is the filtering of conversations. Event, Page, and Group updates are usually filtered properly into the Other inbox, leaving a high-signal, low-noise main inbox of one-to-one messages. However, Messages, including time-sensitive businesses communications, from people who aren’t your friend and don’t have mutual friends are filtered into the Other inbox as well. Without the red notification counter on your home page or gray counters on your Messages sidebar navigation link, it’s easy to forget that important Messages may be being filtered out.
For instance, I didn’t check my Other inbox for a few weeks and had multiple Messages from people who wanted to show me their soon-to-launch products. When Facebook sought to inform users of the five-day window to give feedback on proposed changes to its privacy terms via the Facebook Site Governance Page, that Message was also filtered out. Some users prefer to Message someone they’ve met before adding them as a friend, but these personal, social, one-to-one Messages might not reach their recipients until much later. Users can move a conversation between inboxes once it has started, but Facebook could address part of the problem by allowing users to opt to have the first Message from someone they aren’t connected to routed to their main inbox. Overall, Messages will help most Facebook users. It anticipates the shift to using multiple devices and interfaces to conduct a single conversation. It also declutters the inbox by removing spammy and low-value Page and Event updates. Professionals who are frequently contacted by those they aren’t connected to will need to pay attention to their Other inbox. But for most, we advise upgrading or requesting an invitation to New Messages because it improves one of the core uses of Facebook — instant communication with friends. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Facebook Rolls Out December 2010 Profile Redesign to All Users Posted: 10 Jan 2011 12:26 PM PST Today Facebook began forcibly migrating users to the profile redesign which was launched as an optional upgrade on December 6th, 2010. The redesign puts more focus on a user’s profile information such as their work, current city, and relationship status, and displays recently tagged photos, family members, and selected Groups or friend lists on the profile’s default landing tab. A minority of users have been protesting the redesign and refusing to upgrade on the grounds that the recently tagged photos panel gives friends too much power over what is displayed on their profile, but they will have to grow to accept it.
When Facebook first released the redesign, it was opt-in. Users could press a “Get the New Profile” button on the profile of a friend who had upgraded, or from the new profile’s introduction page. Later, Facebook began showing prompts to upgrade on the home page. There was no way to revert to the old profile design once one had upgraded. While a few users initially complained, which is standard when there is any change to the Facebook interface, enough users upgraded voluntarily and there wasn’t significant sustained protest to dissuade Facebook from a full rollout.
Starting today, any users who’ve yet to upgrade will be migrated to the redesign. There is no option to prevent this, which will likely disgruntle members of the small protest groups including “No to the new FB profile layout” and “New Facebook Profile Sucks.” Users often protest not because they have specific concerns with changes, but simply because they’ve grown familiar with one layout and don’t wish to acclimate to a new one. Facebook has learned to expect these complaints, diffuse the anger through gradual rollouts, and to only backtrack if the company agrees there is a real problem after careful consideration. In our opinion, the profile redesign is good for users. It makes visiting a new friend or potential friend’s profile a more similar experience to a real-life introduction. Users get to see how the person currently looks thanks to the recently tagged photos panel, learn the answers to commonly asked questions like “Where did you grow up?” from the profile info summary, and figure out what interests they have in common through the friendship preview. The redesign also promotes accuracy of profile info by making this info so prominent, while users often forgot to update their work or current city for years at a time with the old design.
The redesigned profile isn’t perfect, and will likely continue to be updated with time. A warning that the members of a friend list added to the Featured People section will be notified of their inclusion in the list could prevent some interpersonal drama. Users who’ve been friends for a long time likely know all of each other’s biographical info, and are more interested in the content of a friend’s wall, which has been pushed down in the redesign. Facebook allows users to hide photos from their recently tagged photos panel, but some users might wish they hadn’t hidden a photo they at first thought was unflattering. Facebook included an “Unhide all” button to the profile editor to fix this.
By guiding users towards giving a more accurate and realistic impression of themselves through the profile, Facebook has succeeded with this redesign. Similar to the news feed, it will just take some time to get used to. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Featured Facebook Campaigns: Carl’s Jr., Hardee’s, Schweppes and Adam Lambert Posted: 10 Jan 2011 09:45 AM PST We saw some interesting Facebook campaigns this week that ranged from an in-house location application by Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s to a Facebook profile makeover from Schweppes. We’ll look at each campaign’s goal, method of engaging users, and impact.
Carl's Jr. and Hardee's Happy Star RewardsGoal: Engagement, Network Exposure, Page Growth, In-Store Spending Core Mechanic: Check-ins with Androids and iPhones Method: A user must download the 72andSunny-created iPhone or Android location app for their phone and then every time they check-in to a Carl's Jr. or Hardee's restaurant (limit three times a day) they work their way up to winning prizes. Currently a chance to spin The Wheel of Awesome — a prize awarding game we wrote about previously — is awarded on the first check-in, and then every fourth subsequent check-in, for a chance to win coupons, gift cards, electronics, movie tickets or other prizes that will be updated during the course of the year. Impact: According to our PageData service, the Carl's Jr. Facebook Page grew from 595,500 Likes on Dec. 15, 2010 when the app launched to 617,800 now. The Hardee's Page grew from 399,200 to about 412,000.
Schweppes' Profile YourselfGoal: Engagement, Network Exposure Core Mechanic: Interesting display of a Facebook user's photos on their Facebook profile after installing the Profile Yourself app. Method: The Profile Yourself app created by Super Social allows a user to display one large photo of themselves on their Facebook profile’s recently tagged photo panel for an interesting effect. Installing the app publishes to a user's stream and creates a branded photo album. Impact: Schweppes' Facebook Page has shown moderate growth, according to PageData. You can find more listings coming today in The Facebook Marketing Bible. Check it out to see other new campaigns including a music app for American Idol star Adam Lambert, an engagement campaign by The Jelly Bean Factory, a campaign to increase foot traffic to CVS convenience stores, and a sweepstakes by jewelry maker Ritani. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Games, Dating and Marketplace Do Well on This Week’s List of Fastest-Growing Facebook Apps by MAU Posted: 10 Jan 2011 07:45 AM PST
Although CityVille averaged almost three million MAU per day for several weeks, it is now under two, with gains of just over a million MAU on the most recent days. This could mean that it will peak sometime in January, though only well after passing 100 million MAU. Dating app Badoo is doing better than ever with 2.6 million new MAU. The Hot-or-Not style app has been battling with Are YOU Interested? for the top spot in its genre, but at this point, it appears to be breaking away. At number three, Marketplace is enjoying an all-time high, which followed a sudden jump in both MAU and DAU in late December. It’s not entirely clear why, but readers are welcome to chime in if they know.
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Once users have clicked through a few dozen photos, Pixable introduces them to its sharing feature that lets users post statistics about which of their friends have commented on, uploaded, or are tagged in the most photos. Users want to share these interesting facts that are accompanied by a link back to the app, creating a organic viral growth mechanism for Photofeed.
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