Inside Facebook
Inside Facebook |
- Facebook Roundup: Birthday, Congress, New HQ, Privacy, Deals, eBay, Gmail, and Messenger
- Thanks to Our Sponsors
- Free Facebook Credits Will Expire February 15th for Some Users
- Facebook Implements Page Wall Post Comment Spam Filter
- Momentus’ Community Health Grader Scores Facebook Pages on Engagement
- Connect Integrations, Games and Poker on This Week’s List of Emerging Facebook Apps
- Facebook Will Allow Users to Watch and Vote on Super Bowl Commercials
| Facebook Roundup: Birthday, Congress, New HQ, Privacy, Deals, eBay, Gmail, and Messenger Posted: 05 Feb 2011 05:00 AM PST
Some speculate it has grown to 600 million monthly active users from 375 million last year. It became the most visited website in the United States, and Wall Street has taken notice, with the company’s valuation soaring to $50 billion. Perhaps most importantly, though, is that it continues to redefine the way we communicate and share such that users people see it as crucial utility instead of a piece of content that could be grown tired of. Congressmen Badger Zuckerberg Over Users' Mobile Numbers - Co-chairs of the Congressional Privacy Caucus sent Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg a letter with 11 questions regarding Facebook's recent move to let developers access users' mobile numbers. In essence, the politicos want to know more about the thought that went into the feature, and whether users can retrieve this information after the fact.
Facebook Outlines Privacy, Innovation Goals - Facebook's Chief Privacy Counsel Michael Richter wrote a 14-page letter to The National Telecommunications and Information Administration regarding a recent report from that agency about commercial data privacy and innovation on the Internet. Richter outlines Facebook's goals, specifically ensuring that privacy protections benefit users and the necessity for privacy frameworks to innovation.
Facebook Ambivalent About Role in Uprisings - Facebook officials are carefully trying to balance the way users leverage Facebook to protest their governments with the way the company must play nice with government officials to gain access to those markets. Rapportive Debuts Deep Gmail Integration - Rapportive, a Y Combinator startup, updated its Gmail add-on this week, reported Mashable. The add-on allows users to see social information about people who send them email, request email contacts as friends, see contacts' Facebook updates and photos, and Like updates and comments from within an email. 2.8 Billion Minutes of Facebook Chat Via Messenger - Windows Live reports this week that its Messenger service now powers more than 2.8 billion minutes of Facebook chat via 18 million users. The integration has grown 75% since November when we last wrote about it, and amounts to 440 million chat sessions. Windows is also powering up its LinkedIn, MySpace and YouTube chat integrations.
Storify Raises $2M - The social content curator Storify raised $2 million in funding from Khosla ventures, reports TechCrunch. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Posted: 04 Feb 2011 08:00 PM PST Inside Facebook extends a big thank you to our sponsors for supporting the continued growth of Inside Facebook. Check them out below!
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| Free Facebook Credits Will Expire February 15th for Some Users Posted: 04 Feb 2011 02:54 PM PST Facebook distributed free Credits last summer to increase awareness of its new “universal” virtual currency, but is now informing users that these promotional Credits will expire on February 15th, 2011. Users who received free promotional Credits but never spent them are seeing a notification informing them to use their Credits before they disappear. The expiration will please developers because they can’t redeem free Credits spent in their games for cash from Facebook as they can with traditionally purchased Credits. However, it will also anger some gamers who will feel ripped off.
Last June, Facebook began offering users 5 free Credits for installing Crowdstar’s Hello City game. The promotion was designed to familiarize users with the Credits system and maintaining a balance. It also helped make them more comfortable spending Credits. This would benefit developers in the long run, but also led to an immediate loss of revenue. It expanded the promotional Credits more broadly in the weeks afterward.
Since then, Credits has matured and is now the exclusive direct payment method for 22 of the top 25 Facebook games, including those from Zynga, Disney/Playdom, EA/Playfish, and many others. All developers will be required to switch to Credits on July 1st, 2011. Some developers reported that up to 70% of the Credits being spent in their games were promotional Credits that didn’t earn them money. This led some developers to increase prices to exclude those users with only small number of promotional Credits. Other developers were impacted less, with only .05% to 15% of incoming Credits being promotional ones. Still, Facebook has been trying to improve its standing with developers, and removing free Credits from the virtual economy will accomplish this. Facebook’s Help Center has details about the free Credits expiration. Purchased Credits won’t be affected, and users can keep any virtual goods they”ve bought with free Credits before February 15th. Facebook protected itself from legal challenges to the expiration by changing its Payment Terms in September to include the statement "If you receive free or promotional Credits, we may expire them at any time." Facebook tells us that users will see a combination of notifications, home page ads and canvas navigation reminders that their credits are expiring until February 15th. It’s possible that Facebook will seed users with free promotional Credits again in the future, though for now its focusing on offering discounts on in-game purchases made with Credits through the new Buy With Friends deal sharing system. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Facebook Implements Page Wall Post Comment Spam Filter Posted: 04 Feb 2011 01:15 PM PST Facebook now turns spam and unrelated comments on Page posts gray to denote them as low quality, while leaving the blue background on other comments. This passive spam filter is applied to new comments on old posts, but hasn’t been retroactively applied to old comments. The filter will make it easy for admins to quickly sift through thousands of comments and delete spam.
In some cases, grayed out comments may not appear to other users. If a Page admin doesn’t agree that a grayed out comment is spam, they can click the ‘x’ next to it and select “Unmark as Spam” to return it to the standard blue color. With time, this should teach the spam filter to be more accurate. Comment spam is a serious issue. The site’s most popular Pages, including Facebook’s own, see the comment reels on their posts filled with links to unrelated Facebook pages, money making scheme sites, and malicious software downloads. Spammers hope to piggyback on the reach of these Pages, which must fight such attacks with around the clock human moderation and Page management tools that flag or delete suspicious comments. Facebook introduced a Spam tab to Page walls in October that pulls out spam posts from users, but it didn’t address spam comments. Facebook also recently began testing a Top Posts filter for Page walls which brings user posts with many Likes and comments to the top of the stack. All of these efforts are designed to promote quality conversation and make browsing Page walls a safer experience. If brands can be sure their Page walls won’t hurt their reputation, they’re more likely direct users to their Facebook presence, and pay Facebook for ads that drive traffic there. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Momentus’ Community Health Grader Scores Facebook Pages on Engagement Posted: 04 Feb 2011 10:01 AM PST Page management company Momentus Media recently released Facebook Community Health Grader, a free, easy-to-use web-based app that "grades" a Facebook Page on the engagement of its fans. The tool serves to attract Page admins to the Momentus site where they can learn about the company’s services. Users enter a Page’s URL, and the site calculates total Likes, and comments, Likes, and community wall posts per day Momentus' Health Grader awards a percentile and letter grade of success. You can also see how your Page compares to other Pages in the same category.
The most telling statistic may be admin posts per day. As Page unlikes are relatively rare, there’s little danger in Page admins posting too often as long as they have compelling content to share. Andy Carvin, NPR’s social media strategist, said that even posting ten times a day didn’t cause a significant increase in unsubscribes, but did expose content to more users and helped Page growth. If admins see their posts per day is below 1, they should definitely consider posting more. What's interesting about the concept of the Health Grader is that while user stats-based apps are common on Facebook, it's somewhat rare to see this applied to Facebook Pages. These types of tools follow the trend of many Twitter grader apps, but since fewer Facebook users are actually Page admins, there's less potential for viral growth. Ultimately the tool gives a good and quick overview of Page health, but doesn't provide the detail of Facebook Insights or other more comprehensive pay-for-service programs. For more information about Page management companies, check out the service provider index that's part of the Facebook Marketing Bible, our all-inclusive guide to marketing on Facebook. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Connect Integrations, Games and Poker on This Week’s List of Emerging Facebook Apps Posted: 04 Feb 2011 08:30 AM PST
Top Gainers This Week
Bandsintown is an app for music lovers and musicians that allows you to either post or follow music activity. The app has a Last.fm, Pandora, iTunes and Twitter integration that provides lots of opportunities to set the user up with bands to follow. The app boasted almost 300,000 users this week, a 55% gain. All manner of games were popular on the list this week. There were virtual world games like Salon Street, Turkish Kebap Dünyası, Dog Show Friends, Spartacus: Gods of the Arena – The Game, PyramidVille in French, Pawn Stars: The Game and Pizza World. Other games included Friend Characters, which creates photos for your profile and Addicting Games, almost like a clearinghouse of different apps and games. Check out our sister site Inside Social Games for more details.
Birthdays Reminder customizes calendars with Facebook friends in Valentine's Day themes. One interesting way the app builds traffic is that, when it publishes the photo album with your customized calendar, each and every one of your friends is tagged in the month they have their birthday. This, in turn, alerts one's friends about the app — the aggressive virality of the feature appears to be a platform policy violation. SpeedDate, which was on our list last week, was also growing a lot this week, counting 889,200 users; the app sets users up on "speed dates" on Facebook to chat. There were also a few poker apps that grew about the same amount this week. Texas Poker in Thai showed a 229% growth this week with 217,500 users, and The Pokerist Club, which showed a gain of 41% with 214,700 users. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Facebook Will Allow Users to Watch and Vote on Super Bowl Commercials Posted: 04 Feb 2011 07:45 AM PST
For years, Google has hosted Super Bowl commercials on YouTube, and has allowed users to vote for their favorites on its AdBlitz channel. Facebook Replay will be in direct competition with AdBlitz in another example of the social network attempting to one-up the search giant by bringing friends deeper into the experience. Facebook users will be able to vote using the Like button until Wednesday, February 9 at 6pm PST. On Thursday, February 10, Facebook will announce the commercials with the most Likes. The promotion will probably net many new fans for the Sports on Facebook Page. Facebook has become a big part of how people celebrate their favorite sports teams. Facebook says that the day the Pittsburgh Steelers (800,000 Likes) and Green Bay Packers (325,000) advanced to the Super Bowl, 6.5 million related status updates were made by 4.6 million people. During and immediately after the playoffs, the Steelers were mentioned in over for million status updates, compared to the Packers who were referenced 2.9 million times. However, independent analytics company Infegy says that a higher percentage (78%) of mentions of the Packers across the web during January were positive, compared to only 69% for the Steelers. More than 182 million people Like a team, athlete, league or sports activity on Facebook and referral traffic to sports sites has increased by more than 180% in the past year. Watching sports is a fundamentally social activity, as is watching commercials. Users may seek to consume the commercials where they can easily discuss them with friends, so Google’s AdBlitz could lose a significant share of watchers to Facebook Replay. After all, users will already be on the social network cheering on their favorite team. |
Facebook Turns Seven Years Old – This year the social network grew from a single contained website to a framework for social interaction that is integrated across the web thanks to the Open Graph and social plugins including the Like button. Facebook had success with new products such as its location-service Places, while others products such as Groups and Deals are taking longer to catch on. It executed major revamps of its Photos and Messages products that are still being rolled out, and its virtual currency Facebook Credits was adopted by the Platform’s biggest developers.
Facebook Announces New HQ - Facebook 
eBay Hires Away From Facebook – eBay 
Gawker Redesign All About Facebook - Gawker's redesign went live this week on three of its affiliate blogs and 
Buddy Media By the Numbers - Buddy Media COO Kass Lazerow posted a 
BraveNewTalent Raises Capital - Social recruitment application BraveNewTalent secured an undisclosed amount of funding this week, according to 
Facebook will allow users to watch and vote on the commercials from this year’s Super Bowl as soon as they air. The commercials will appear on the Facebook Replay tab of the | You are subscribed to email updates from Inside Facebook To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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