Inside Facebook
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- Washington Post Launches Facebook Marketing Agency SocialCode
- Facebook Overhauls Its Apps for Feature Phones in Cooperation With Snaptu
- Highlights This Week from the Inside Network Job Board: MdotM, Speeddate, & More
- Facebook Video Chat App VChatter Scores Funding, Although Its Market Is Uncertain
- Photos and Horoscopes on This Week’s List of Fastest-Gaining Facebook Apps by DAU
| Washington Post Launches Facebook Marketing Agency SocialCode Posted: 19 Jan 2011 03:30 PM PST The Washington Post Company has officially launched its full-service Facebook marketing and advertising agency SocialCode. The agency will offer Page management, app development, social commerce, fan monetization, message testing, and advertising through Facebook’s Ads API. As former newspaper readers move to Facebook to consume content, The Washington Post is experimenting to see if social marketing can replace ailing brand advertising in print as a core revenue stream.
Graham’s daughter, Laura Graham O'Shaughnessy, is general manger of SocialCode, which soft-launched in July. Like many Ads API services, SocialCode was initially developed by The Washington Post’s to manage its own Facebook marketing efforts, but will now be used to help brands. The company will compete with other full-service agencies like Webtrends, Buddy Media, and Experian, which just acquired Ads API tool provider Techlightenment this week. By leaving the familiar local marketing industry for the internet, The Washington Post as well as Tribune and Gannett that have both recently launched digital services, will have to contend with services from around the world, not just in the cities where they own media outlets. These established publishers will likely need to leverage their existing relationships with brands to make up for their late start.
Developing a stable of high quality technologies for efficient creation of apps and dynamic optimization of Facebook ads can take significant time and resources. We’ll be doing a full profile of SocialCode’s services in the near future to see how it compare with other Facebook marketing options. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Facebook Overhauls Its Apps for Feature Phones in Cooperation With Snaptu Posted: 19 Jan 2011 02:22 PM PST
Facebook said today that it’s overhauling its offerings for more than 2,500 models of feature phones through a partnership with Snaptu. It has launched a new Facebook for Feature Phones app that works on Nokia, Sony Ericsson, LG and other manufacturers. The company says the new app has an easier-to-navigate home screen, syncs contacts and supports fast scrolling of photos and friend updates. More full-featured apps tend to see more usage, so Facebook for Feature Phones could fuel signficant increases in Facebook mobile’s DAU, especially in the developing world. Facebook is also extending some of the partnerships it initiated last year through Facebook ’0′, a free, low-bandwidth version of the site meant to fuel the company’s growth in developing countries. Fourteen mobile operators from Tunisia to the Ukraine will give their customers free access to Facebook. Carriers typically use these deals to entice new mobile subscribers to upgrade to paid data plans and they usually carry a one-year term. Snaptu, which specializes in supporting smartphone-like experiences on feature phones, has been growing aggressively on Facebook and boasts 3.4 million monthly active users, according to AppData.
> Originally posted on Inside Mobile Apps. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Highlights This Week from the Inside Network Job Board: MdotM, Speeddate, & More Posted: 19 Jan 2011 12:16 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 MdotM, Speeddate, King of the Web, Meteor Games, 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 Video Chat App VChatter Scores Funding, Although Its Market Is Uncertain Posted: 19 Jan 2011 11:33 AM PST Chatroulette-style Facebook video chat application vChatter has just raised $350,000 from angel investor Dave Kennedy, who co-founded a dating site that would eventually turn into Match.com. The funding will be used to make hires for the app’s development team with the goal of more rapid deployment of new features and efficient scaling, the company tells us. The funding comes at an interesting time, as despite vChatter’s quick growth over the summer to a MAU peak of over 2.56 million in September, it has since slipped to 1.12 million, according to AppData Pro, our premium application metrics and trends monitor.
The world became enamored with the concept of video chatting with strangers last year, particularly around Chatroulette, but soon grew tired of the shallow interactions and high volume of unsolicited nudity. The eighteen year old founder of that company, which received valuations as high as $40 million at the peak of its popularity, says the massive fluctuation in traffic “was like a movie: Everybody watched it, and then everybody else. Well, now that they’ve all watched it, they’re less interested.”
Though vChatter has integrated features for chatting with specific friends — getting around Chatroulette’s initial interface problems — it is still experiencing a similar decline. Its DAU is now roughly a quarter of its peak in September. The app may be establishing a sustainable user count following the fad, leaving the future uncertain.
Facebook video chat could be a shaky industry, as Facebook could simply integrate video into its popular existing Chat feature, eliminating the need for a third-party app. vChatter will need to distinguish itself with innovative features that can reestablish growth or monetize existing users. [Image credit: Fast Company] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Photos and Horoscopes on This Week’s List of Fastest-Gaining Facebook Apps by DAU Posted: 19 Jan 2011 08:00 AM PST
After six weeks of leading all our DAU gain lists, CityVille has finally been dethroned, by the ever-growing Windows Live Messenger Connect app. CityVille is still growing, but Zynga appears to have cut back on marketing for the game. Several other large (but not that large) games did relatively well. Kingdoms of Camelot and Ravenwood Fair both picked up significantly, perhaps as a result of increased promotion; both are published by 6waves, which currently has a half-dozen older but growing apps in its fold. My Photos is the first utility, a daily app that automatically creates wall posts for photos. Despite very low reviews, the app continues to do well — which is fairly typical for apps that focus on wall posting. Horoscopes is similar, but gets much higher reviews and has an enviably high stickiness, or percentage of monthly actives who return on a daily basis.
LivingSocial rounds out the top ten. This app long ago evolved from a basic list of your favorite things to a major group shopping site; but oddly, the app appears to be non-functional at time of writing. |
The Washington Post has been a pioneer in how publishers can use Facebook. It was one of the 
The downside to being one of the most popular mobile apps in the world is that 
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