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Inside Facebook

53 Local AMBER Alert Facebook Pages Will Post Missing Children Feed Updates

Posted: 12 Jan 2011 06:23 PM PST

Facebook held a press conference today to announce the launch of 53 AMBER Alert Pages that will dispatch bulletins about missing children via the news feed. Facebook will donate 50 million advertising impressions to promote these Pages. The news follows our discussion yesterday about the value and potential future of Facebook as an emergency information distribution medium.

Each US state, as well as the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands now has its own AMBER Alert Facebook Page. A national Page provides links to each local Page on a tab app developed by Page management company Involver, which Facebook previously used to power its Security Quiz and Stories apps, among others. There, users can also download copies of the quarterly AMBER Advocate newsletter.

Concerned citizens can Like their local AMBER Alert Page to begin receiving news feed updates when a local child goes missing. Since these updates are sent to the news feed, users will see them whether they’re using a web or mobile interface to access Facebook.

Chris Sonderby, Facebook’s Lead Security and Investigations Counsel, explained how the viral nature of Facebook will increase the effectiveness of the updates:

“[Users] will receive notification of an AMBER Alert…in their news feed. They in turn can share that information with their friends in a way that immediately spreads the word that a child needs our help, especially in those crucial first hours following an abduction.”

During the question and answer period of the conference, Sonderby explained how Facebook updates would be posted by the Pages for different states if abductors were suspected to have traveled. This reduces the limitations imposed by having separate local AMBER Alert Pages.

Ernie Allen, the head of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, defended the opt-in nature of the Pages, explaining “we are very sensitive to people considering this as spam. It’s a better way…than to do it automatically and offend a bunch of people who say “we don’t want to receive all of this.’”

Allen concluded the conference by saying “this is a great example of private /public partnership [and] a great model for solving many of the nation’s most serious problems.” We agree, and expect that the success of the Facebook AMBER Alert Page system will lead to creation of similar Pages for distribution of civil and natural disaster emergency information.

Facebook Returns “What’s On Your Mind?” Prompt to the Home Page

Posted: 12 Jan 2011 02:44 PM PST

Facebook has reinstated the “What’s on your mind?” status update prompt to the home page and other places where the publisher is shown. Facebook had hidden the prompt from some users for the past six months, requiring a content tab from the publisher to be clicked before the appropriate question or option to upload media was displayed. Now users will always be greeted by the “What’s on your mind?” call to action when visiting Facebook, which should lead them to contribute content more frequently.

Encouraging users to post status updates is key to keeping the news feed fresh for everyone. If users visit the site and don’t see new content, they’re less likely to return as frequently.

Facebook released statistics last year stating that 60 million users update their status every day during February 2010, and now says that 30 billion pieces of content are uploaded every month, or roughly 50 per user per month. Since it’s much easier to spontaneously update one’s status than to ask a question, upload a photo or video, or post a link, providing a visual reminder to post these updates should increase shared content numbers.

Making status updates the default tab of the publisher is simply good design. While the expanded prompt will push down a user’s news feed or wall a few pixels, it removes a barrier to one of the most common forms of engagement on Facebook. The ever-present call to action should convert more users from spectators into participants, making Facebook more interesting to browse and keeping the daily active user count growing.

Highlights This Week from the Inside Network Job Board: Digital Chocolate, Cie Games, TheBroth & More

Posted: 12 Jan 2011 12:37 PM 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 Digital Chocolate, Cie Games, TheBroth, NaturalMotion, and Ubisoft.

Anonymous:

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.

Formspring Closes $11.5M Round, Sees New Growth with Facebook Users

Posted: 12 Jan 2011 12:36 PM PST

Freewheeling question-and-answer site Formspring announced an $11.5 million second round of funding last night, led by Redpoint Ventures with Baseline Ventures participating. It also released its new “Respond” button that websites can embed to ask users questions about their content. The announcements follow tumultuous year of rising and falling traffic on Facebook and off of it. Our readers will note that the company’s name keeps appearing in our weekly AppData leaderboard posts, so here’s a closer look at the company’s Facebook integration and resulting traffic.

First, for those not familiar, the site lets users ask and answer basically any question, ranging from "What would be the best thing about being a vampire?" to "What are you doing right now?" When you log in, Formspring has a list of questions for you to answer (or delete) and you can always ask your own questions, too. It’s more like a well-designed Yahoo Answers and less of a knowledge-base question-and-answers site like Quora.

Overall, the company’s traffic has fallen from a high of 30-some million earlier in 2010 to a slowly rising 22.3 million today, according to Quantcast. On the Facebook side, Formspring originally offered a tab with questions and answers that users could put on their personal profiles. That visibility helped the company grow to a peak of 5.29 million monthly active users, according to our AppData tracking service, and may have played an important part in its site growth as well.

But Facebook removed personal profile tabs (but not Page tabs, of course) in a process that started in August and went through October, which may have driven the company’s Facebook numbers down to a low of 2.91 million as of October 13th or so. As you can see from the second graph, below, Formspring’s personal profile tabs appear to have disappeared entirely around the end of August — if you try to use the Facebook app today, you’ll see the message, above.

But Formspring spent much of the last year tweaking its core site interface, and adding easier ways for users to sign in with Facebook, find Facebook friends, and share questions back to Facebook. The result of all that work, from what we can see, is a roller coaster traffic pattern that currently seems to have flattened at around 3.90 million monthly actives as of today.

Its daily active user numbers look better. After recovering from its October low, the site has averaged around 800,000 daily actives on Facebook. Following a slight lull over the holidays, the company is now hitting its highest daily actives yet, bringing in more than 1 million yesterday.

So that’s what’s been happening with traffic. Now here’s a brief look at how the Facebook integration looks today.

After you log in with Facebook Connect, any Facebook friends you have on the site are shown to you as people you can potentially follow — following people on Formspring is anonymous. Users can login with Facebook Connect and also integrate Formspring into MySpace, Twitter, Blogger, Tumblr and WordPress.

You can answer the questions and select to publish to whichever social networks you've authorized. Once you check the boxes, for Facebook and Twitter for example, you click "Save Answer" and the answer appears in your Facebook stream or as a tweet on Twitter. To be clear, every time you answer a question or ask a question, it appears in your stream.

You can’t invite specific people to share with, but you can blast to all your friends/followers by posting to your stream. You can tell people to "Ask me anything" or post that you're having fun with Formspring, or to create an account or follow you.  And when your friends do see it in the stream, it's easy to see the questions (which are bolded) but not the answers (which are in light gray underneath). Other apps usually highlight users' interactions with an app to interest their friends, not so the case here where the emphasis is more on the questions than user answers.

Formspring’s Respond button is the company’s version of a social plugin. Similar to Facebook’s Like button, it increases engagement and creates a link back to the publisher, in this case from the user’s Formspring profile. Facebook is proving how being integrated into third-party websites can entrench a web service, which can help protect it from competition. Part of the company’s new funding could be used to expand this social plugin program.

Facebook Displays Old Status Updates in Memorable Stories Sidebar Module

Posted: 12 Jan 2011 10:36 AM PST

Facebook is testing a new Memorable Stories sidebar module which shows users four of their old status updates and when they were posted. The module is sometimes displayed in the right sidebar when users click “View Post” on a news feed or wall story. In some cases, users can click on the post’s timestamp to view the original post, complete with Likes, comments, and an additional set of Memorable Stories. In other cases, clicking through a post returns an error.

Memorable Stories breaks from the typical reverse chronological ordering of Facebook content and instead helps users consume a succesion of their best posts from across the years, and increasing time-on-site.

The feature doesn’t just show updates which received multiple Likes and comments, but rather pulls a random assortment of old status updates. In that way it’s more like flipping to a page of an old diary than a collection of your most popular or relevant posts. Users can click an ‘x’ next to stories to remove one and see another.

With time, Facebook may improve the feature by changing it to only show posts with Likes. It could also apply natural language processing to attempt to weed out posts with negative sentiment.

So far we’ve only seen Memorable Stories from as far back as 2008, though Facebook has clearly saved all of our content since you can download a copy. Apparently, the module can display status updates a user had removed from their wall, which some may have thought meant they had deleted. This could irk some users who wanted to permanently retract a a previous statement

Memorable Stories will be enjoyable for most, though some might not want to be reminded of more difficult times by seeing status updates they posted while stressed, depressed, or angry, or even from happy times that have since passed.

Facebook’s Photo Memories sidebar module would often show images of a user’s old romantic partners, leading to hurt feelings and strong negative feedback on the feature. Facebook responded by changing Photo Memories so it wouldn’t display photos of people users were previously listed as in a relationship with. It will be interesting to see if some users have similar negative reaction to Memorable Stories about how in love they were with a past partner, or how tough it was when they lost their job.

Memorable Stories addresses the issue that the most recent content on Facebook is not always the most compelling. By processing Likes, comments and tags to determine a post’s relevancy, Memorable Stories could show the best of your entire life on Facebook, just as the news feed does for your past week.

[Thanks to Brittany Darwell and Imogen for the tips.]

Tagged, Formspring and More on This Week’s List of Fastest-Growing Facebook Apps by DAU

Posted: 12 Jan 2011 07:45 AM PST

Small social network Tagged appears for the first time on this week’s AppData list of fastest-growing Facebook apps by daily active users. The app is the latest example of a Connect integration, which we’ve also seen larger players like MySpace do.

Top Gainers This Week
Name DAU Gain Gain,%
1. CityVille 18,591,715 +1,620,113 +10%
2. Marketplace 996,978 +428,876 +75%
3. Causes 1,250,533 +328,041 +36%
4. Windows Live Messenger 12,032,329 +293,998 +3%
5. Millionaire City 2,678,013 +198,868 +8%
6. 寵物戰爭 235,763 +161,834 +219%
7. Tagged 195,691 +136,798 +232%
8. Formspring 1,029,000 +133,563 +15%
9. Texas HoldEm Poker 6,981,466 +132,997 +2%
10. Café World 3,428,097 +132,895 +4%
11. แฮปปี้คนเลี้ยงหม 689,945 +123,055 +22%
12. HTC Sense 3,905,124 +103,385 +3%
13. Horoscopes 3,344,276 +96,998 +3%
14. Country Life 808,712 +95,114 +13%
15. Phrases 1,599,421 +93,010 +6%
16. Spotify 964,627 +89,524 +10%
17. Auto Club 90,553 +86,669 +2,231%
18. It Girl 1,000,207 +86,215 +9%
19. Friends photomontage 90,005 +84,234 +1,460%
20. Status Shuffle 938,234 +80,328 +9%

CityVille once again leads the list, with 1.6 million new DAU. Last week, we suggested that the game might have finished its DAU growth, but it has bounced back for once more week. However, its gains in both MAU and DAU have slowed down significantly at this point.

Marketplace has also done well in the past couple weeks. The Facebook classified ad service has seen its ups and downs over the past year, but definitely more of the latter of late; its DAU is currently higher than it was for almost all of 2010.

Coming to Tagged again, the social network is not the only example of Connect integration on the list. Windows Live Messenger, of course, is the biggest, but Formspring, which just took a large $11.5 million funding round, also uses Connect alongside its platform app. And HTC Sense is a Connect app for both Android and Windows-based smartphones by HTC.

There’s just one more app we haven’t seen before on this week’s list: Auto Club, at number 17. The auto-fan app is just a gallery of cars, with a “Vote” button and pre-ticked “Post to my wall” button; users can vote once every ten minutes.

torsdag den 13. januar 2011 at 07.31