Inside Facebook
Inside Facebook |
- Platform Update: Facebook Lets Developers Ask a User for Their Address, Phone Number in the Graph API
- Facebook Roundup: Media, Facebook Phone, Pages, Early Facebook-Like Site, Taiwan and More
- Next Video App Streams the Most Popular YouTube Links on Facebook
- Friendly, Facepad Grab 2 Million Monthly Actives on the iPad as Facebook Holds Off on Official App
- Chinese and Russian Both Appear on This Week’s List of Emerging Facebook Apps
| Posted: 15 Jan 2011 04:53 AM PST In another part of its effort to become the main artery for social data, Facebook is now allowing developers to ask a given user for their physical address and phone number within the user object of the Graph API. This information, announced as part of this week’s developer blog post update, helps anyone from game developers to mail and phone marketers reach directly to where users are at all times. It’s especially valuable because it’s so sensitive, so Facebook requires developers to ask for a separate set of permissions within the main “Request for Permission” interface.
Given this new sharing option, users should be even more careful about what they see on the permissions page, rather than just clicking through. While quick sharing makes for a more seamless user experience, we could see Facebook itself providing an additional prompt asking users to confirm that they want to share this information, in order to help prevent accidental sharing. Facebook also goes out of its way in the developer post to explain that users are only sharing information about themselves, not their friends. The other piece of news from the post this week: Facebook has added a long-requested way to subscribe to the "edge.remove” to track when a user unlikes a page. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Facebook Roundup: Media, Facebook Phone, Pages, Early Facebook-Like Site, Taiwan and More Posted: 15 Jan 2011 03:46 AM PST
The First Facebook Phone? – If you recall, last fall there was a big hoopla about Facebook developing its own phone. Well, Pocketnow reports that the INQ Cloud Touch is the first of two "Facebook phones," as it has deep Facebook integration. The phone in question is the next version of a model that has had Facebook integration for years. Facebook's Rosenthal Leaves, Built Mobile Carriers to 300 – Alison "Ali" Rosenthal from Facebook's business development team is leaving the company this week. She worked primarily on mobile business development recently, especially in overseeing and growing Facebook's relationship with 300 mobile operators globally. Best Times for Pages Posts – SocialFresh published a set of conclusions on the best times for Facebook Pages to post updates, using data from Vitrue’s blog and Facebook’s Data team’s Page. Specifically, the best times include 3 p.m. EST when the largest number of users are active on Facebook. There is also a morning peak at 11 a.m., and an evening peak at 8:00pm EST. Despite the 3 p.m. peak, the morning probably is due to the fact that nighttime gives posts time to accrue Likes and comments before the night's drop in engagement. Vitrue said morning posts were 39.7% more effective than afternoon posts. Monday is when the most users are posting and Wednesday when the most users are commenting. Avoid Saturday and Sunday when engagement is the lowest.
Facebook Purchased FB.com for $8.5 Million – We reported last year that Facebook's employees were going to be using the fb.com domain name internally, and not it's come to light that Facebook paid the Farm Bureau $8.5 million to do so. Pentagon Manages Its Own Social Media – Although The Pentagon previously hired people to teach staffers how to use social media, the assistant secretary of defense for public affairs now is having his staff of 100 or so does the job in-house. Mixpanel Analytics Grows 40% Monthly - TechCrunch reported that Mixpanel, an analytics startup, is its data volume 40% each monthly, tracking more than 1 billion actions a month and is set to add to its current data set the ability for users to create "custom email digests of data" either hourly or daily and bookmarks that allow users to track "visitor retention by source." Winklevoss Twins in Court Again - The twins Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, who have been carrying on a legal dispute with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg over the origins of Facebook, are back in court. They’re now trying to get a better deal on a 2008 settlement currently worth around $140 million in Facebook stock, claiming that Facebook had misrepresented the value of the company at the time and as a result gave them less stock than they feel they deserve. Facebook Participating in IPv6 Upgrade – Facebook, along with other major Internet companies, has agreed to participate in the first global trial of IPv6, the upgrade to the Internet's primary communications protocol, IPv4. The test will run on June 8.
Stanford Students Created Facebook-Like Site in 1999 – Whatever the Winklevosses may claim about the originality of what they were trying to build this past decade, The Stanford Daily has a story this past week about a social networking website created at Stanford University in 1999 by students that combined information from the Stanford directory with photos from the university's “Facebook.” The university ultimately shut down the site. [Image Via Stanford Daily] SNAP Interactive Raises $8.5M for Social Dating – SNAP Interactive, which claims 30 million installs for its social dating app across its platforms, including Facebook and iPhone, is set to raise $8.5 million in a "private placement transaction." TechCrunch reported that the company has agreed to sell about 4.25 million shares of common stock in the deal.
Facebook Struggles in Japan, Thrives in Taiwan – Although Facebook has yet to take command of Japan's online audiences, users in Taiwan are increasingly flocking to the social network. comScore reported that Facebook's visitors in Taiwan almost beat Yahoo's Wretch.cc social network there and the company hit 9 million users in January. In Japan meanwhile, there are less than 2 million users. MySpace to Lay Off 500 – MySpace is set to lay off about 500 workers, about 47% of its workforce, and is also entertaining potential purchase offers. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Next Video App Streams the Most Popular YouTube Links on Facebook Posted: 14 Jan 2011 12:35 PM PST Next Video is an app that aggregates the most frequently shared comedic YouTube videos on Facebook into a content channel that offers a relaxing, laid back viewing experience. Independently developed on top of the Graph API by a 20 year-old Rutgers student, the simple interface lets users skip to another video, save favorites, and share interesting videos to their news feed. Next Video is an example of the compelling products that can be created using Facebook’s publicly available user data.
Developer Thomas O’Malley was unsatisfied with YouTube’s native browsing interface. He saw Facebook as the determinant of whether a video went viral, and believed that “the first thing you do when you find something interesting is go to Facebook and share it with friends.” So he developed Next Video in the span of three weeks to allow users to discover and comment on videos without leaving Facebook. Next Video searches the stream of public Facebook posts for links YouTube videos accompanied by keywords that indicate the video is humorous, such as “funny” and “hilarious”. The videos that have been shared the most over the past few days are collected and streamed through the app sequentially, relieving the users of the burden of choice. The app uses Facebook’s Comments social plugin to allow users to express their opinions as well and attract new users, since it defaults to publish a user’s comments to their profile along with a link back to the app. Since Next Video constantly features new content, users will likely continue to tune in once they’ve installed it.
Next Video’s model could easily be applied to other styles of videos or types of media. Someone could create a version that displays “cute” or “weird” videos, or that aggregates links to songs on SoundCloud, photos on Flickr, or news articles on CNN. While we believe Facebook’s recommended privacy settings — sharing posts and photos with everyone — are too cavalier, they facilitate apps like Next Video. If Facebook suggested that users restrict the visibility of their posts, there might not be enough data to accurately gauge the popularity of different types of content. In this way, Facebook’s recommended settings risk the safety or reputation of some users in exchange for creating value from the public data for the entire world. O’Malley’s goal isn’t to immediately monetize the app with ads, but to build its user base and add features such as a feed of the original posts about the video currently being shown, and a way to see what friends have watched. The app is currently bootstrapped, but O’Malley says he’d consider taking a small amount funding in order to accelerate development. Next Video demonstrates how the Facebook Platform helps to offer a relatively open playing field, where one person with an idea can invent something great. While in the past kids might have played guitar in their bedroom dreaming of becoming the next Rolling Stones, now they can build apps and dream of becoming the next Zynga. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Friendly, Facepad Grab 2 Million Monthly Actives on the iPad as Facebook Holds Off on Official App Posted: 14 Jan 2011 08:01 AM PST
Facebook’s deliberate approach to designing and launching its long-anticipated iPad app has created an opening for enterprising developers. Two of them, Loytr and Oecoway Inc., have racked up two million monthly active users between themselves and hopefully, made a little money too. Loytr’s Facepad (shown at the bottom of the story) has gained 546,931 monthly active users up from none at the beginning of the month when it launched. Meanwhile Friendly for iPad (shown above), which is older and came out in July of last year, has accumulated 1,494,593 monthly active users according to AppData. A third Facebook iPad app called Touch HD currently has 26, 125 monthly actives.
Both Facepad and Friendly have free and paid versions, which are currently $0.99. Facepad’s paid counterpart comes without advertising, while Friendly’s free version lets you try before you buy. Although Facepad seems to be quickly catching up to its rival, its DAU/MAU ratio, a measure of stickiness that compares daily active users to monthly actives ones, falls short compared to Friendly. Facepad’s DAU/MAU has tumbled down to below 20 percent, while Friendly’s has hovered steadily around 32 percent for the past month. > Continue reading on Inside Mobile Apps. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Chinese and Russian Both Appear on This Week’s List of Emerging Facebook Apps Posted: 14 Jan 2011 08:00 AM PST
The top three apps, GodsWar Online, 寵物戰爭 and Texas HoldEm Poker – Deluxe ★★★★★★ are all games by Chinese developers — respectively a massively multiplayer game, a pet fighting game, and a card game. We’ve seen Chinese-language games do quite well in the past, but there’s a newer trend of English-language games by Chinese companies doing well with a broader international audience. Likes Likes is the first non-game app, and one that we’ve seen before under various names; it gives users a list of clever sayings that they can “like” on their profile. It’s followed by TheFacepad, an iPad Connect app that, as we’ve also noted before, is getting traction but doesn’t seem to be keeping its users around. Its stickiness, or percent of MAU that returns as daily actives, has dropped to 11 percent. There’s a problem with AppData’s language display on number six, which is properly called Что твои друзья думают о тебе? The reason for the bad display is simple — Russian-language apps are extremely rare, with only a few million Russian-speaking users, so we hadn’t had a chance to see the problem before. The app, a simple friend quiz, seems to be doing quite well anyway. Friends photomontage and My Friends in 2010 are fairly self-explanatory. Far more interesting is Newspaper Clips, which allows users to create their own fake newspaper clip using a friend’s profile. The result, which actually looks pretty good, is saved to your photo gallery, with the option of tagging your friend in the image.
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