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Inside Facebook

Bug Stops Some International Iframe Facebook App Users From Making Purchases With Credits

Posted: 16 Feb 2011 04:47 PM PST

Users of Facebook applications that use iFrames are experiencing a bug, in some countries, that prevents the iframe from resizing properly, cutting off the app horizontally mid-page and preventing users from spending Facebook Credits.

Currently, we know the bug is impacting users in UK, Germany, Russia, France, Israel, Ukraine, Romania, Latvia, Belarus and Romania. The bug has significant negative implications for applications monetizing through Facebook Credits.

Bugs are a natural side effect of operating such a big platform, and Facebook recently renewed its commitment to fixing them as fast as possible as part of its Operation: Developer Love. Most bugs only have a small impact, and only affect a minority of users or developers. However, major changes to Facebook over the last week, including the redesign of Pages and the added ability for Pages to use iframe tab applications, have been accompanied by a few serious issues.

The app height bug has received 70 votes of importance from developers, making it the highest priority canvas applications bug. Facebook has “ASSIGNED” this bug that was submitted on Monday. Facebook has also “REOPENED” the Credits bug, which has a relatively high six votes of importance.

Until Facebook fixes this bug, applications may lose potential revenue since certain users can’t buy virtual goods. One of the limitations of a unified virtual currency system on the Platform is that if Credits experiences downtime, developers don’t have the option to temporarily switch to another payment method.

As Facebook incentivizes developers to adopt Credits with beta access to new features in the lead up to the July 1st, 2011 mandatory switch to Credits, it also needs to make sure its payment system is as stable as possible.

Facebook Reinstitutes App-to-User Notifications via App-generated Requests

Posted: 16 Feb 2011 03:47 PM PST

Facebook has made a series of significant changes to its viral channels over the past several years. Since launching with almost no restrictions on developer use of notifications, requests, and the news feed, Facebook has systematically changed the way viral channels work to try to find the right balance between providing powerful distribution options for developers and protecting the user experience.

Today, Facebook launched some updates to requests that it’s calling “Requests 2.0″ that introduces app-generated requests and simplifies the process of managing the home page bookmark counters that alert users to outstanding requests.

App-generated Requests

Facebook first added app-to-user notifications for developers in August 2008, but then removed them in February 2010 after the signal to noise ratio of the notifications channel had become too low to justify the spammy experience for users. Since then, the primary channel for app to user communication has been email.

Now, Facebook is allowing developers to send user communication through the requests channel, encouraging developers to “Use these requests to update the bookmark count to encourage a user to re-engage in the app (e.g., your friend finished her move in a game and it's now your turn).” We’re still clarifying how Facebook will govern volume here, but this represents a significant opportunity for developers. We’ll have more on this soon.

It’s interesting that Facebook is now channeling previous notification functionality through the requests channel. Facebook CTO Bret Taylor told us last year that Facebook was planning on reintegrating some of the previous viral channel functionality that had been disabled earlier last year, and this looks like an example of one of those changes.

Automatic Bookmark Count Syncing

When enabled via the Developers application, Facebook automatically syncs the bookmark count with the number of pending requests. These requests now expire 14 days after being received by a user. This streamlined requests process will likely encourage applications to send more requests, increasing game re-engagement  but also pestering some users with what they might consider spam.

Requests began being displayed as bookmark counters and were removed from the home page’s right sidebar requests panel in September 2010. Facebook soon reinstated the requests in the right sidebar to help developers for effectively re-engage users.

In December, Facebook began showing requests in a third place on the home page: the notifications channel. Some heavy gamers complain that these notifications drown out more social notifications about photo tags and wall posts, but Facebook is still showing requests in this channel. In January, it increased or eliminated the limit on the number of requests a user could send from an application per day.

Previously, developers had to use the incrementCount and decrementCount APIs to manually adjust the number shown in the counter besides their app’s bookmark on a user’s home page. Facebook has now unified these APIs so developers merely send requests, and the count is synced automatically.

To enable this option, developers can go to the the Advanced tab of the Developers application, and change the “Upgrade to Requests 2.0″ setting in the Migrations section. This will cause bookmark counts to sync when they send user-generated requests that users explicitly approve using the Requests Dialog, or app-generated requests via the Graph API to users who have granted the proper permissions.

When users with pending requests visit an app, Facebook encourages developers to “highlight the request the user wants to act upon and delete requests when the user acts upon them”. This makes the reason of the request clear and keeps users from perceiving requests as a spammy way to get them to revisit an app. To prevent bookmark counts from accumulating, Facebook clears each request’s counter after 14 days. Developers can find JavaScript and PHP code examples on the updated Requests documentation page.

Highlights This Week from the Inside Network Job Board: Bulbstorm, Badgeville, W3i, & More

Posted: 16 Feb 2011 12:53 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 Bulbstorm, Badgeville, W3i, Casual Collective, 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.

With Compliance Deadline Looming, List of Approved Facebook Platform Ad Providers Reaches 43

Posted: 16 Feb 2011 12:51 PM PST

Three more companies have been added to Facebook’s list of approved platform ad providers over the last couple of weeks, including virtual goods monetization company Live Gamer, performance marketer MediaWhiz and ad network IndieClick.

The list, introduced in mid-December, shows companies that have signed on to Facebook’s Platform Terms for Advertising Providers — a document it introduced more than a year ago, to restrict third parties from doing things like scraping and using Facebook data for their own purposes. The point of the list is to further clarify to developers who they are allowed to work with.

Last week, Facebook also updated its general platform policies to include a clear mention of the list, and stated that developers will only be able to use listed developers as of February 28th (for more, see our analysis of all recent platform policy changes). Although the list has included the same language since mid-December, this winter appears to have been a bit of a grace period.

The number of listed developers has steadily risen from 14 when we started counting to 43 today, and Google is still conspicuously absent. That might not be as big of a deal as the name-brand suggests, at least for developers today; although it has experimented with ads on Facebook apps for years, Google has never been especially aggressive in pushing its business on the platform, and it has not been a main choice for most developers. Given that Google collects data from around the web to help it target ads, we’re guessing that it doesn’t want to sign on to Facebook’s terms any time soon.

So, anyway, here’s a bit more about the three latest companies to be listed. Live Gamer has been active for years providing virtual goods storefronts, analytics software, payments, as well as offers from other companies that users can take to receive goods (which appears to be why it’s listed here). MediaWhiz is an online performance marketing agency that uses email, display ad networks, text-link ads and other typical performance methods to reach users. IndieClick is a banner ad network that works with advertisers to reach, as the name suggests, readers on a variety of hipstery web sites.

Chinese, FrontierVille, Social Statistics and Connect on This Week’s Fastest Growing Facebook Apps by DAU

Posted: 16 Feb 2011 07:45 AM PST

There were six apps on our list of fastest growing Facebook apps by daily active users this week that are in Chinese. We gather this information from our AppData service, which shows that, in addition to the Chinese apps, there were several games and Connect apps on the list this week, too.

Top Gainers This Week

Name DAU Gain Gain,%
1. Social Statistics 1,165,998 +1,109,975 +1,981%
2. Windows Live Messenger 13,515,085 +335,665 +3%
3. FrontierVille 5,734,936 +322,579 +6%
4. ibibo.com 286,084 +250,515 +704%
5. Diner Dash 213,565 +201,712 +1,702%
6. 德州撲克(中文版) 611,938 +188,796 +45%
7. 開心水族箱 1,220,579 +154,296 +14%
8. HTC Sense 4,394,997 +136,356 +3%
9. Phrases 1,678,939 +134,559 +9%
10. 小小戰爭 761,483 +126,242 +20%
11. 開心農場 1,122,001 +118,950 +12%
12. @Hearts 579,221 +98,873 +21%
13. Matrak Sorular 128,529 +95,868 +294%
14. Ravenwood Fair 1,054,787 +92,948 +10%
15. FarmVille 中文版 470,632 +92,152 +24%
16. Prosperous New Year To All My Friends :) 217,492 +88,674 +69%
17. Grooveshark 157,526 +88,002 +127%
18. Resort World 510,136 +86,595 +20%
19. 2011星座運勢 103,999 +82,816 +391%
20. Persian’s Daily Clip 137,461 +82,719 +151%

Most of the Chinese apps were games, although there was also a horoscope app. There was 德州撲克(中文版), the Chinese version of Texas Hold'em, which grew by about 188,800 DAUs, 開心水族箱 (Happy Aquarium) with 154,300 users, 小小戰爭 (Little War) with 126,200, 開心農場 (Happy Farm) with 119,000 along with the Chinese version of Farmville, which only added 92,200 and 2011星座運勢 the horoscope app for 2011 added 82,800 DAUs.

Social Statistics, an app that counts the top 10 people who are your "fans" on your profile and then publishes this to your stream, spiked in usage in the days leading up to Valentine's Day. The app grew by over 1.1 million DAUs. Other notable apps were Zynga's FronterVille with 322,600 new DAUs, Dinner Dash with 201,700, Turkish Matrak Sorular (Funny Qs) which grew by 95,900 and Ravenwood Fair with about 93,000 new DAUs.

Phrases continues to grow, despite not being available to U.S. users, with an increase of 134,600 DAUs this week. Two holiday-related apps were on the list. The @Hearts app, which allows users to send hearts to friends on Facebook saw 98,900 DAUs and the Prosperous New Year To All My Friends app grew by 88,700 DAUs.

There were also a few Connect apps, Grooveshark with 88,000 new users and ibibo.com with 250,500.

torsdag den 17. februar 2011 at 07.13