Inside Facebook
Inside Facebook |
- Analysis: What’s Behind Facebook’s Friendfeed-Style Acquisition of Beluga?
- Facebook Announces New Currencies, Payment Options, Credit Spending Reports
- New Facebook Credits Rules Limit In-Game Offers and Rewards to Protect User Data
- Top 25 Facebook Games for March 2011
- Mobile Group Messaging Developer Beluga Acquired by Facebook
- Facebook’s New Comments Box Plugin Filters Website Comment Reels by Relevance
- Facebook Adds 17 More Companies to Its Preferred Developer Consultant Program
| Analysis: What’s Behind Facebook’s Friendfeed-Style Acquisition of Beluga? Posted: 02 Mar 2011 03:16 AM PST
Facebook added yet another small group of talented developers and product managers to its stable today with the acquisition of Beluga. With Facebook’s focus this year on bolstering its mobile platform and offering a Messages product that seamlessly ties the web and mobile together, Beluga is a nice fit with the company’s overall direction. Also, with Facebook acquiring not only the Beluga team but the startup’s technology, the acquisition resembles the way the company bought Friendfeed in 2009 and kept its service alive indefinitely. Here is a bit of context for how to think about the acquisition: Group messaging, while hyped, is actually not a cheap business to run: Compared to most of the consumer-oriented startups we usually write about, group messaging has high operational costs beyond covering headcount without the immediate cashflow. The business that is benefiting most financially from the group messaging wave right now is not Beluga or rival GroupMe. It’s Twilio, which is likely making a mint from charging these startups for API access when they need to plug in SMS. Twilio’s standard rate to send or receive a text is two cents per message although there are cheaper deals for high-volume access. GroupMe said it was doing about 1 million messages a day two weeks ago. While we don’t know details on GroupMe’s Twilio deal, it’s no wonder why the company had to raise $10.6 million from Khosla Ventures in January. Beluga sidesteps many of these costs by resorting to SMS only when a user doesn’t have either the Android or iPhone app, but their costs were still sizable. That said, SMS is a major cash cow for the carriers. Disrupting it could be a large and lucrative opportunity. Facebook and Beluga probably weren’t in acquisition talks as of three weeks ago: I wrote an article about the company’s savvy combination of mobile and social virality tactics three weeks ago after hearing that the Facebook mobile team was impressed with Beluga. When I mentioned this compliment to co-founders Ben Davenport and Lucy Zhang a few weeks ago, they seemed flattered and surprised. >> Continue reading on Inside Mobile Apps. |
| Facebook Announces New Currencies, Payment Options, Credit Spending Reports Posted: 01 Mar 2011 02:47 PM PST
Facebook has also announced that developers will now receive daily, line-by-line summaries of all the Credits transactions on their apps. Developers will also be moved from a monthly to a bi-monthly payment schedule, with the payment delay reduced to 21 days. International Currencies and Payment OptionsIn the next few weeks, Facebook will begin to support the Taiwan dollar, Malaysian ringgit, Thai baht, New Zealand dollar, and the Singaporean dollar for payments. Through its partnership with monetization service company Playspan, who was recently acquired by Visa, Facebook will also offer the following alternative payment methods, which include online payment networks, debit cards, pre-paid cards and more:
It will now be easier for users from these parts of the world to buy Facebook Credits. In some cases, users who previously had no way to spend money within social games will be able to become paying customers. It will now be more lucrative for developers to design or localize their games for these markets, and the expanded potential customer base will increase revenues. These areas of the world will also become higher-return targets for social game advertising, which could drive up international bid prices. Payment Schedules and Credit Spending SummariesFrom now on, Facebook developers will receive real-world payments from Facebook for the Credits their users have spent on a bimonthly basis, opposed to the old monthly schedule. They’ll receive a payment for all activity between the 1st and 15th of the month, and another for activity between the 16th and end of the month. Payments will be delivered by eCheck 21 days after the end of each bimonthly cycle. Previously, payments weren’t sent out until four to five weeks after the end of a monthly cycle. These payment schedule changes will give developers access to more of the money they’ve already earned, facilitating hires, hardware purchases, and faster iteration. Developers will now receive two daily emails — one with a summary of all the Facebook Credits transactions on their apps from the past 24 hours with chargebacks and refunds highlighted, and a second email with line-by-line details of each transaction. Previously, summaries only included the overarching figures from the first email, such as total revenue and total refunds. Developers will also receive two reports with the same formats alongside each bimonthly payment that aggregate two weeks of daily reports. The emails employ a unique ID system to securely pass developers data that only they can map back to a user’s identity. This additional data will help developers spot spending trends, fraud, and whales who spend substantially more than other users. Facebook may eventually create an interface through which to interact with this data, similar to Insights for their apps. Detailed Credits transaction summaries create an opportunity for someone to offer a Facebook Credits transaction history analytics service to developers that could help them deduce actionable data. Information about the performance of Credits helps developers improve their payment flows and game designs to maximize user spending, which in turn benefits Facebook. |
| New Facebook Credits Rules Limit In-Game Offers and Rewards to Protect User Data Posted: 01 Mar 2011 02:35 PM PST Facebook has announced new rules governing how games on the Platform can reward users. The rules go into effect starting July 1st when all games must use Facebook Credits as their sole payment platform. Only if developers use Facebook’s approved offer partners will they be allowed to reward users with virtual currency, Credits, or virtual goods for completing hard offers — those that require a user’s personal information, such as making credit card purchases or signing up for subscriptions. The changes are designed to protect users by preventing apps from rewarding them for giving up their personal information. The trust this protection fosters is important to the longevity of the Facebook Platform. Currently, the only approved offer partner is TrialPay, making this change a big gain for that company. Facebook is seeking to add more partners before July, though.
Unapproved offer companies will only be able to serve soft offers — those that don’t require personal information, such as watching a video ad. Soft offers don’t generate nearly as much revenue for developers or offer providers as hard offers where users submit valuable contact information or pay money. If developers choose to use an unapproved offer partner, they will only be able to serve soft offers, and may only reward users with virtual goods, not virtual currency or Credits. Developers can still offer users whatever currency, Credits or goods rewards they want in exchange for completing internal offers that don’t involve a third party, such as installing another of the developer’s games or watching a trailer for one of its games.
Since the beginning of 2011, applications have been required to encrypt User IDs in HTTP POST headers and only provide their third-party partners with anonymous, unique third-party identifiers instead of User IDs to confirm that a user has completed an action on the third party’s system. Applications can only use third-party ad networks that have signed Facebook’s terms and been placed on a white list. As it stands now, TrialPay would have a monopoly on third-party hard offers come July, cutting out other providers such as Tapjoy and Super Rewards that are also currently popular on the Platform. Facebook recently partnered with TrialPay, actively promoting its DealSpot in-game offer system. Facebook is considering which other providers it will approve, but there’s no promise that an alternative to TrialPay will be available by the migration. The rules may anger some developers, but maintaining the user experience and keeping user data safe is crucial to the long-term health of the Platform on which these developers operate. |
| Top 25 Facebook Games for March 2011 Posted: 01 Mar 2011 02:11 PM PST
Like last month, 16 of the 25 largest Facebook games by monthly active users have experienced user declines, with seven, including CityVille, steming from social developer Zynga. Many of these games were launched a year ago or earlier, and massive new games are not emerging to take their place, at least in terms of equivalent MAU numbers. But before we get into the details, the other important thing to note is that while MAU shows total size, the daily active user count is a better measure of the popularity of a game with serious users, and the game’s ability to monetize through virtual goods. CityVille, for example, has been losing MAU but gaining DAU in the past month; Zynga has flat DAU overall versus a month ago, at 52.9 million today. (For details on these stats and much more, check out our AppData service, which tracks the traffic to top Facebook apps and developers.) MAU numbers still provide valuable information about what new games are gaining significant numbers of new users. Ravenwood Fair, It Girl, and Mall World have done especially well. Moreover, two newcomers join the list from Gaia Online and wooga in the form of Monster Galaxy and Monster World, respectively. > Continue reading on Inside Social Games. |
| Mobile Group Messaging Developer Beluga Acquired by Facebook Posted: 01 Mar 2011 12:15 PM PST
Beluga is in the middle of where Facebook wants to be: socially-driven mobile applications. It lets people easily create private mobile-based chat rooms, add friends, and share information. It faces a range of competitors, like GroupMe. It has stood out for an especially slick interface, and a variety of smart uses of communication channels on Facebook and on mobile devices. Here’s a list we put together, As we covered in detail on Inside Mobile Apps last month, these include:
The company was posting some small but interesting growth numbers over the course of February, in terms of Facebook users, although up to this point it has fallen from its peak of 66,000 monthly active users and 4,000 daily active users, according to AppData. Clearly, the acquisition was about the quality of the team – ex-Google engineers Ben Davenport,Lucy Zhang and Jon Perlow — and the promise of their product. Facebook has been working on a variety of ways to become more relevant to mobile, although beyond its own native applications and integrations, the results have been limited so far. Its apps for iPhone, Blackberry, and Android apps and other handsets, as well as its SMS and Facebook Zero integrations, have all helped generate significant mobile Facebook usage; the company said, as of months ago, that more than 200 million of its users access the service via a mobile device. Yet, Facebook has not yet found its wider role in the mobile world. Many developers may use Facebook as a way to seed a user base for a new app, or as one of a number of channels to help promote an existing app, but they typically do not rely on Facebook to be the core social graph — instead, they use the address books of phones, and work to create their own. For its part, Facebook is encouraging HTML5 adoption, part of an industry-wide effort to promote the standard, in order to help developers build high-quality mobile web apps. It is also working on a variety of mobile integrations with handset manufacturers — phones that prominently feature Facebook messages, photos, and other components of the core service. Some rumors have persisted that Facebook is working on a fork of the Android code base, that would further enable it to reach more devices and mobile users; the company is continuing to deny that it is working on a special instance of a “Facebook Phone” In this broader context, Beluga’s team — and its smart focus on building social functionality into mobile features — looks like a natural fit to work on any number of projects at Facebook. The statements from Facebook and Beluga aren’t much more specific. Beluga, via its site: Beluga is now friends with Facebook We are happy to announce that Facebook has acquired Beluga! Since launching Beluga, we’ve appreciated all the enthusiasm and positive feedback from our users. We’re excited to continue to build our vision for mobile group messaging as part of the Facebook team. Beluga and Facebook are committed to create new and better ways to communicate and share group experiences. For now, Beluga will continue to function as it does today. Your Beluga account and data will not be lost. We’ll be providing more details on future plans for Beluga in the coming weeks. Stay tuned! Ben, Lucy and Jon Team Beluga Facebook, via TechCrunch:
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| Facebook’s New Comments Box Plugin Filters Website Comment Reels by Relevance Posted: 01 Mar 2011 09:10 AM PST Facebook has released a major update to its embeddable Comments Box social plugin for third-party websites. The plugin processes social signals to surface the most relevant comments, and a new moderation dashboard allows admins to block profanity and other objectionable content. Users can login to the plugin with their Facebook or Yahoo! credentials, and comments are published to a user’s wall by default, driving traffic to the website.
With these enhancements, Facebook’s Comments Box plugin is ready to compete with WordPress comments, Disqus, IntenseDebate, and other embeddable comment systems. By powering their comment reels with the authenticated identity of Facebook profiles instead of allowing anonymous comments, websites can increase the quality discussion, repel trolls, and not require Facebook users to register for a proprietary commenting account. Facebook has been tweaking this new version of the Comments Box plugin and testing it on the Facebook Blog and Developers Blog for months, trying a voting system before settling on using Likes to gauge a comment’s credibility. Web publishers can now configure their plugin and copy the one-line embed code from the Comments documentation page into their site for easy implementation. The plugin is already live on several sites across internet, including this one. The Comments Box plugin is a solid choice for most websites except those where discussions might include sensitive information. There is no option to comment anonymously, leaving no outlet for a whistleblower who wants to secretly offer a news tip or a victim who wants to tell a personal story. However, in most cases, preventing anonymity leads commenters to be more civil, and consider what they’re writing before they publish under their real name.
Social Relevance and Identity The most innovative improvement is employing social relevance to order comments differently for each user instead of showing everyone the same reverse chronological order. Comments by a viewer’s friends, friends of friends, as well as the most Liked comments and active reply threads will appear higher in the stack. Meanwhile, comments marked as spam or reported as abusive by other users will be hidden from public view and left for a moderator to address. Details about each commenter from their profile appear next to their name, giving other visitors context about them and deepening the site’s sense of community. According to a commenter’s privacy settings, their mutual friends, job title, work place, age, or current city may appear beside their comments to those permitted to see that information, giving other visitors a feel for their perspective. Moderation ToolsOnce embedded on a website, admins can access the Comment Moderation Tool. This dashboard allows them to visit the page on which a comment was made, Like it, approve it, hide the comment from public view, or ban the user from commenting on their site. Hidden comments still appear to the friends of those commenters. The moderation flow is slighly less streamlined than some WordPress commenting plugins. There’s no quick link to reply, adding friction to moderating questions. There’s also no way for admins to edit user comments. This prevents subjective censorship, but it also stops admins from altering comments that mix insight with objectionable content, or from protecting naive commenters who post contact information. Comments Box doesn’t handle linkbacks, so admin will have to process those separately.
The moderation settings allow admins to add other admins or moderators, use a standard keyword blacklist, create a custom blacklist, set common grammar mistakes to be auto-corrected, and permit or deny third-party logins. They can also set the moderation mode to “Make every post visible to everyone by default” or “Let me approve each comment before it’s shown to everyone”.
Comment Syndication and Notifications Increase Traffic A “Post to Facebook” box appears checked by default when users compose a comment. The wall post and news feed story generated by this feature helps web publishers generate leads from the networks of their commenters. Page admins can also use this feature to syndicate their comments on websites to their Page’s wall. Combined with the full stories and images that are now published when users click Like buttons, users should begin seeing considerably more content from third-party website content in their news feeds. When a user’s friends see the wall post or news feed story, they don’t have to visit the website to join the conversation. When users go to comment on the post or story, a “Comment on [website]” button appears, informing them their comment will be automatically syndicated to the website’s comments reel. Posts, stories, and the Comments Box plugin on the website all stay synced, no matter where comments are made. To encourage return visits from past commenters, they’ll see Facebook notifications with links back to the website when their Comments Box plugin comments are replied to. Facebook doesn’t typically link notifications off-site, so this is a big opportunity for sites with active comment reels to increase return visits.
There’s one other subtle benefit of the Comments Box plugin to web publishers. Traditionally, if a troll or abusive commenter disrupted conversation on a site, the only thing admins could do was ban them internally, which had little repercussions for the trouble maker. But with the Comments Box plugin, spam, abuse, and ban reports all go to Facebook. If a user gets too many of these reports, they could have their Facebook account terminated, severing all their friend connections. Most users aren’t willing to risk this type of modern social ruin, and are therefore less likely to comment abusively. Right for ManyBy offering websites improved civility and relevance on their comment reels, increased referral traffic, and custom moderation tools, the new version of the Comments Box plugin should attract many additional web publishers. These factors may outweigh shortcomings, such as the lack of support for Google or Twitter login credentials, and no option to forgo social relevance and display a real-time reverse chronological stream of comments. Though not appropriate for all sites, the innovative use of social data and inherent benefits of authenticated identity will help evolve the state of commenting across the internet. Instead of overflowing with rants by strangers, comment reels could become a place to rationally discuss content with existing friends and meet new ones. Update: Thanks to our commenters for pointing out some other issues with the Comments Box plugin. Users wouldn’t be able to comment if their work place or country blocks Facebook. There’s no easy way for admins to archive or migrate comments to another system. Also, comments by users logged in through Yahoo! show no profile picture or link back to their profile, making them appear obviously inferior to those by people logged in through Facebook. To try out the updated Comments Box plugin, click the “Add Comment” link at the top of this post, or look for the comment entry field beneath the “Leave a Reply” headline at the bottom of this post. |
| Facebook Adds 17 More Companies to Its Preferred Developer Consultant Program Posted: 01 Mar 2011 09:01 AM PST
The list, for those not familiar, features “experienced developers who have built numerous Facebook integrations and offer solutions ranging from contests, polls and campaigns to deeply integrated social experiences,” according to Facebook’s program page. The application process, available here, requires developers to provide a variety details about themselves and their past work. Here are some more quick notes on the program, before we get into the list. It accepts submissions in rounds — the latest one opened today and will end on March 31. Its last update was around a year ago, when the program added 36 additions, following the initial list in late 2009. In other developments, it also introduced a mapping feature last June to help interested clients find nearby consultants. 41? 29! For those keeping track, also note that two companies that previously appeared on the list are now one: Syncapse bought Nudge last fall. Also, existing program participant Likeable Media changed its name from theKbuzz. |
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