Inside Facebook
Inside Facebook |
- Facebook Roundup: Prineville, Zynga, Android, Verizon, Egypt, Tunisia, Japan, Zuckerberg and The Oscars
- Facebook’s Redesigned Page Creation Flow Helps Admins Choose a Category
- Platform Update: Developers Site Reorganization, Deprecations Reminder
- Facebook Confirms Removal of Suggest to Friends Feature from Pages, Reducing Virality
- ISA 2011: Facebook CTO Bret Taylor on The 2011 Facebook Platform Roadmap [Video]
- Dating and Pictures Appear on This Week’s List of Emerging Facebook Apps
| Posted: 28 Jan 2011 10:00 PM PST
Facebook Working On Tablet Interface – Facebook is set to improve its tablet interface, Facebook CTO Bret Taylor told TechCrunch this week. That might not mean native apps, but it does mean some interface changes: “We could do more with click-targets,” he said about the current interface on the iPad. “Certain elements are very small." Access Facebook Deals with Android - Facebook Deals, the company's Groupon competitor attached to its Places location service, is now accessible for Android V1.5.1 and is available for free on the Android Market.
Facebook Awarded $360M Damages – Facebook was awarded more than $360.5 million in damages after a U.S. District Court judge found that a spammer had accessed users’ login information and used it to spam other users.
Crowd Factory Raises $6.5M – Crowd Factory, the crowd-powered marketing app company, announced this week that it had secured $6.5 million from Storm Ventures, according to a company press release. Facebook Blocked in Egypt - Facebook, along with Twitter, YouTube and mobile Internet, are reportedly being blocked by the government in Egypt in an attempt to quell protests there. Facebook confirmed to Reuters a drop in Egyptian traffic Thursday. Facebook's Tunisia Response – Ammar, the nickname in Tunisia for government Internet censors, literally tried to steal everyone's Facebook password in that country using code that recorded user login information when they accessed their accounts. Facebook first noticed glitches in December, heard anecdotes about profiles being deleted, and noticed things were awry in January. In an interesting profile, The Atlantic reports that Facebook dealt with the problem in five days by first routing Tunisia's login info to an encrypted server so it couldn't be stolen and secondly by asking identifying information of Tunisian users who logged in when the code was running.
Facebook Data Increasingly Used in Court – Reuters reported that case law is increasingly allowing private Facebook information to be used as evidence in court. Previously data that was marked as "private" was off limits, but this is more often not the case in court. Insurers Use Facebook to Detect Fraud - Insurance companies are now using Facebook to find out whether or not people are lying to them. For example, one woman took a medical leave from her job, began receiving disability payments, but then was cut off when Facebook photos showed her "frolicking at a beach and hanging out at a a pub," The Los Angeles Times reported. Similar stories have been appearing in recent years.
Facebook Used Professionally in Japan – "Facebook is Japan's LinkedIn," is the title of an interesting post by paul McMahon, who writes that Facebook's requirement that users be identified with their real names discourages use as a social network, but this fact also has gotten users to adapt Facebook as a professional network. State of the Union Chatter on Facebook - The day of President Barack Obama's State of the Union address, Facebook was abuzz with discussion about the speech and related topics. The U.S. Politics Page on Facebook published a post with some breakdown: Spending was the most-discussed topic, along with jobs, debt and health care; education was a big one, too, and certain politicos got more attention than others.
Facebook A Tech Partner with Sundance - The Sundance Film Festival has partnered with Facebook to bring technical expertise to the festival's participants. Specifically, Facebook will offer Sundance Institute alumni advice, educational info and best practices on how to engage fans on the social network. 'The Social Network' Nabs 8 Oscar Noms – "The Social Network" movie, also referred to as "The Facebook Movie," was nominated for eight Oscars, including best picture, best actor, best director and best screenplay adaptation. Facebook Talks Expansion In Prineville, Ore. - Facebook's server in Prineville, Ore. has allowed the company to host more of the site's content on its own servers and now the company has begun to talk expansion with officials there. Specifically the city manager said Facebook reps mentioned building a "second building just like the one they just built," which will eventually cover 300,000 square feet. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Facebook’s Redesigned Page Creation Flow Helps Admins Choose a Category Posted: 28 Jan 2011 08:58 PM PST Facebook has redesigned its Page creation flow to be more intuitive and user friendly. The different Page types are represented with images that when clicked reveal fields for required information and a drop-down menu of specific Page categories. The redesign should reduce the likelihood of new admins miscategorizing their Pages — a costly mistake that confuses potential fans and can’t be undone without deleting the Page. Below we include a guide for admins with tips on selecting a category.
The old design lumped all Pages into either local business; brand product or organization; artist, band or public figure; or community. The new “Create a Page” breaks Pages up into the following types:
The visual representations and more distinct categories should ease admins through what can be a stressful process. Why Page Categories are ImportantA Page’s category determines what fields on the Info tab users see, as well as what section of a user’s Profile it will appear in when Liked. Certain categories, such as people, sports teams, athletes, and musicians have significantly more prominent placement than categories like games and activities. Some categories, including local business, website, organization, company appear at the very bottom of the profile in the Other Pages section that require an extra click to be revealed. To increase the chances of their Page being discovered, admins should choose the most prominent category that accurately describes them. For instance, a baseball team and its associated business departments should designate itself as a sports team rather than an organization because sports teams are more prominent in the profile. Page categories also appear in hover cards and news feed posts to inform unfamiliar users of what a Page is. The more specific yet accurate a Page’s categorization, the easier for users to recognize it as something they want to Like. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Platform Update: Developers Site Reorganization, Deprecations Reminder Posted: 28 Jan 2011 07:51 PM PST Facebook announced it the Friday Platform update announced that it has reorganized the Developers site to make information easier to find. It has also posted a final reminder about January 31st being the termination date of several features and APIs. The Developers site was previously divided into different sections that required multiple clicks to navigate between. The new version is more like a dashboard, with a sidebar of unfolding navigation links for faster browsing.
All Documentation pages now show navigation links to:
All these pages now display a quick link to the Developer app from which devs can control their own applications. These changes, part of the continuing Operation: Developer Love, look good and should please devs who hate wasting time navigating sites when they could be hacking. January 31st DeadlinesFacebook will begin returning errors for the following APIs after January 31st:
Developers and Page admins will no longer be able to access the Old Insights tool as the new tool now contains all the data it offered and more. Finally, Facebook will require all applications to implement the User ID encryption system put forth in the iFrame POST Proposal. Facebook has extended several of the deadlines and notified developers still calling the old APIs in an effort to break as few applications as possible and keep devs happy. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Facebook Confirms Removal of Suggest to Friends Feature from Pages, Reducing Virality Posted: 28 Jan 2011 12:09 PM PST Facebook removed the Suggest to Friends link from Pages last week when a bug caused the feature to load incorrectly. However, an article in the Help Center confirms that the option will not be returned to users, and that they should now use the Share button to ask Friends to Like a Page. The closing of this viral channel should reduce Page suggestion spam, but may also stunt the growth of Pages unless they pay for more ads.
Suggest to Friends was originally implemented in March 2009 to help admins grow their Pages, which had launched the month before. Admins would often use the About box located beneath the link to encourage users to invite friends. Users were limited to sending approximately 20 invites at a time. Admins will still be able access the Suggest to Friends feature on their own Pages, though it is stil broken at this time. Users can’t access the feature, but can instead use the Share button, located at the very bottom left Pages. The Share button allows users to make a post of the Page to their profile, “which may appear in their friends’ News Feeds”. Users can also opt to Share directly to specific friends via Message, and can send up to 20 of these at a time.
If users happen to click the tiny “Send as a Message instead” link, they’ll have to remember and type in names rather than use the Suggest to Friends’ multi-friend selector. Messages do generate red notification counters on the top navigation bar that attract attention, but neither posts nor messages explicitly instruct recipients to Like the Page, further reducing the likelihood of conversion. Page admins with “Click ‘Suggest to Friends’” or similar calls to action in their About sections should change them to read “Click ‘Share’ at the bottom”. As when Facebook shut down viral channels for applications, this change will force Facebook Pages to increase their reliance on paid marketing, like the new Sponsored Stories ad unit. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ISA 2011: Facebook CTO Bret Taylor on The 2011 Facebook Platform Roadmap [Video] Posted: 28 Jan 2011 10:30 AM PST Facebook CTO Bret Taylor joined us at our conference Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011 to shed light on how Facebook is thinking about the core questions facing the future of the Platform. The full video of the discussion is available below. Highlights include his discussion of Facebook’s plans for mobile, its focus on HTML5, and its efforts to combat spam and improve the platform. The Facebook Platform is just three and a half years old, but has been widely adopted by web application developers, mobile app developers, and web publishers around the world. Past changes to the Platform have exerted significant impacts on the developer ecosystem. This year, between mobile, Credits, the Open Graph, Instant Personalization, and updates to communication channels, developers can expect even more changes to come. ISA 2011: Fireside Chat – Facebook CTO Bret Taylor on the 2011 Facebook Platform Roadmap from Inside Network on Vimeo. To download an mp3 version of this talk, please email us at info (at) insidesocialapps (dot) com. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Dating and Pictures Appear on This Week’s List of Emerging Facebook Apps Posted: 28 Jan 2011 08:13 AM PST
Made by VisionSync, Social Connect is a little different from the big dating app that has been tearing through the rankings lately, Badoo. Instead of using the popular Hot-or-Not style ranking screen, Social Connect tries to be more like a full-featured dating site with search, chat, full profiles and messaging.
Profile Banner is by MiniMax, a non-game app developer that has been doing quite well of late. Having a banner isn’t an intentional feature for Facebook, but it’s possible with some careful photo album manipulation, a trick that Profile Banner exploits quite well. And the third big gainer on the list is Draw My Thing, an OMGPOP mini-game that the developer pulled over from its destination site with a few interesting adds, like the ability to make a wall post of your Pictionary-style attempts to sketch out words. |
Facebook's Murphy Back, At Zynga, Too -
Boku, BilltoMobile Partner - Mobile payment companies 
Mark Zuckerberg's Fan Page Hacked – Mark Zuckerberg's Page posted 
Protect Facebook Comments From Facebook With UProtect.it - A new app called uProtect.it allows 
There is some overlap between categories. Local business includes categories from across several of the other types, but admins have to include a street address and phone number to choose this type.
The Developers Blog also has a new sidebar, turning it into a hub for references developers may need to quickly check. The sidebar includes:
The change will hurt Page growth because the Share button is significantly less prominent and easy to use than Suggest to Friends. The Share button is buried where few users will notice it, whereas Suggest to Friends was above the fold and just below the eye-grabbing profile picture. Shares to the feed may reach more users, especially if coming from someone with many friends, but the conversion rate is likely lower since the posts are mixed in with other compelling content.
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