Inside Facebook
Inside Facebook |
- Kontagent Real-Time Social App Monitoring System Tracks Errors and User Reactions
- All of Facebook’s Like Buttons on Third-Party Sites Now Publish a Full News Feed Story
- This Week’s Headlines From Across Inside Network
- Platform Update: 180 Pixel Profile Pictures, Fighting Bugs, Startup Day
| Kontagent Real-Time Social App Monitoring System Tracks Errors and User Reactions Posted: 28 Feb 2011 06:30 AM PST Today, social games analytics tool provider Kontagent releases its Real-Time Social Application Monitoring System for tracking actions and metrics such as installs, invites sent, notification email clicks, and revenue. Animated graphs in the tool update as frequently as every ten seconds, allowing developers to immediately recognize a breakdown of code for a viral channel, an error in their servers, or the success of a new virtual good. The real-time data will allow developers who use the tool to take more risks and deploy code faster without doing as much testing, since problems can be identified before their opportunity costs get too high.
The Real-Time Social Applications Monitoring Systems, or Real-Time SAMS, tracks over 10,000 events per second, and developers can choose to see their stats update every ten seconds, one minute, or five minutes. They can quickly determine the impact of a new landing page, altered flow, new game mechanic, or virtual good price change on a variety of metrics. If they see a certain count drop to zero, they know something is broken and can attempt to fix the bug before more users are affected. Developers can design their own dashboards, selecting from many standard metrics, or create their own custom formulas such as revenue per paying user in the last seven days. Without the tool, developers would have to wait until their slower, internal server monitors notice operation problems. They would also have to painstakingly test edge cases that are difficult to predict, but with the tool they can push code live and respond to issues on the fly.
Larger developers spend millions and years to create these types of tools. By offering them as a service, Kontagent is leveling the playing field, allowing smaller developers to gain the same deep, instant insights that the giants of the industry have. While we haven’t tested it first hand, the granularity of the data available through Real-Time SAMS should help application developers iterate more quickly.
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| All of Facebook’s Like Buttons on Third-Party Sites Now Publish a Full News Feed Story Posted: 27 Feb 2011 02:22 PM PST When users click the Like or Recommend button on a third-party website or within a Facebook app, it now publishes a full news feed story instead of just a one-line Recent Activity story. Previously, full stories with headlines, thumbnail images, and captions were only published if the website chose to implement the “Like with Comment” version of the button and users chose to add this additional context. As the Like button now encompasses the functionality of the Share button, which Facebook has removed from its documentation, Facebook may phase out the Share button entirely. The change gives more prominence to outbound links in the news feed and on a user’s wall, and so will increase referral traffic and draw more sites to add the Like button.
Full stories appear larger, more compelling since they often include an image, and are ranked better in the news feed than Recent Activity stories. Therefore, the stories generated from clicks of the Like / Recommend button will been seen by more of a user’s friends and drive more traffic to third-party websites and apps than before.
Since Facebook launched its social plugins including the Like button at last year’s f8 conference, over 2.5 million websites have integrated them. In July, Facebook introduced Like with Comment, allowing some implementation to publish full feed stories. By August, 350,000 sites had Like buttons, and that count is probably much higher now. Facebook has since allowed developers to integrate Like buttons with social games and other Facebook apps, and is trying to increase third-party awareness of their ability to publish news feed stories to those who click their buttons. Up until now, Facebook had supported three different ways to share third-party content to the news feed:
Now, all versions of the Like / Recommend button publish a full feed story, whether a comment is added or not. The change has been applied retroactively, so old Recent Activity feed simple stories from Likes now appear as full stories. Likes allow third-parties to publish future updates to a user, and therefore drive more traffic and create more lifetime value than Shares. This value lures additional third parties to implement Facebook’s social plugins, so it’s in Facebook’s interest to shift everyone from Share buttons to Like buttons. The Share button is often displayed amongst a set of other buttons for Twitter, Digg, bookmarking, and email, but Facebook would rather have its own real estate opposed to being lost amongst the competition. Now that Facebook has given the Like button almost a year to prove its worth, third-parties would probably implement a Like button if they could no longer use the Share button, granting Facebook this improved placement.
The phase out of the Share button is evident in Facebook’s documentation. The “Facebook Share” typeahead result shown when searching for “Share” on the developers site directs to the Like button documentation page.
Overall, the change will benefit users, third-parties, and Facebook. Compelling Liked content from around the web will appear in the news feed more frequently, initiating discussions between friends. Third-parties will gain traffic from new users, inspiring more to implement Facebook’s social plugins. This increased presence across the internet will spread awareness of Facebook, raise barriers for its competitors, and seed a client base for a potentially monetizable plugin, such as an Open Graph ad unit. [Thanks to Amit Lavi for the tip] |
| This Week’s Headlines From Across Inside Network Posted: 27 Feb 2011 08:31 AM PST Here are all the latest headlines from around Inside Network.
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| Platform Update: 180 Pixel Profile Pictures, Fighting Bugs, Startup Day Posted: 27 Feb 2011 08:30 AM PST
The December 2010 profile redesign slightly reduced the maximum size for profile pictures from 200 pixels wide to 180 pixels. Since newly uploaded profile pics won’t have a 200 pixel version, Starting March 1st the Graph API call The two ways to access the
The transition from 200 pixels to 180 pixels for Facebook has recently been touting its rededication to combatting the growth of the backlog of developer submitted bug reports. The post explains that the bug triage team holds a “Roach Motel” event once a month where they attempt to produce bugs from the backlog and assign them to engineers. Oddly, this makes it sound as if the team only works on triage one day a month, instead of consistently.
Last week, Facebook held a Startup Day in conjunction with the Startup America Partnership, “a private-sector alliance intended to dramatically increase the development, prevalence and success of innovative, high-growth U.S. firms” initiated by the White House. Over ten startups attended, and there’ll be more chances for developers who are looking to participate as Facebook will hold 12 startup days in 2011. |
Kontagent’s tools track over 100 million social and mobile application users a month, and are employed by game developers including EA/Playfish, Sony, Ubisoft, Digital Chocolate, and TenCent. 
The 
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