gravatar

Inside Facebook

Inside Facebook

Inside Facebook


ReverbNation Adds Like-Gating to My Band Facebook App, Renames it Band Profile

Posted: 10 Mar 2011 05:00 AM PST

ReverbNation, one of the earliest developers of Facebook apps for musicians, has released an upgrade to its popular My Band app, renaming it Band Profile. Users of the free app will now be able to completely customize the look of their app; and can require users to Like, Share, or provide their email address to gain access to certain pieces of content.

The updates make ReverbNation the most customizable free apps for musicians to promote themselves on Facebook. It now offering some functionality, albeit in a rougher form, that recent sensation BandPage by RootMusic requires users to pay $2 a month for.

Band Profile, formerly My Band, has been grrowing relatively steadily since its launch in late 2008, tripling its daily active user count since last year and breaking into the top 20 fastest growing apps at the end of January 2011. However, Band Profile has encountered stern competition in the last six months, with BandPage rocketing past it to now have 931,295 DAU compared to its Band Profile’s 310,967, according to AppData, our data service tracking application traffic and growth.

Meanwhile, some of Facebook’s most popular musicians including Lady Gaga and Linkin Park have begun signing on with smaller boutique firm DamnTheRadio, which was recently acquired by FanBridge. ReverbNation saw it clearly had to change to stay competitive, and this new set of updates succeeds in placing it back in the top tier of solutions for Facebook musicians.

Most noticeably, bands are no longer stuck with the drab blue and gray color scheme of My Band, which faded into the Facebook canvas and made it difficult to create a strong branding impression. Band Profile allows admins to select themes and specific color values to change the appearance of their app’s background. The color value interface is less intuitive than the color slider available through the $2 a month BandPage Plus, but is free for all Band Profile users.

Another significant addition is the ability to require users to Like, Share, or submit an email address to gain access to songs or music videos. This is an effective way for bands to drive Likes, gain viral distribution, and collect contact info.

Shares to the wall and news feed have an improved feel. A functional version of the Band Profile appears in-line within the shared story, allowing a user’s friends to play songs, watch videos, view tour dates, photos and the bands bio, join the mailing list, or re-share the app to more friends.

Songs are hosted on ReverbNations servers, and can be sold or offered for free unlimited download through Band Profile. RootMusic handles music downloading through SoundCloud, which requires users to pay for a premium account if they want to allow more than 100 downloads of any song.

Since ReverbNation makes its money not from its app, but by selling additional off-Facebook services including email marketing and music distribution to online stores, it can offer the rich functionality of Band Profile without charging musicians. This loss leader strategy could help it regain market share from BandPage and attract new users from the long-tail of musicians looking to promote themselves on Facebook for free.

Reminder: Deprecation of FMBL Page Apps and POST for Canvas Deadlines Approach

Posted: 09 Mar 2011 05:31 PM PST

This week, Facebook is completing two major migrations that impact Page admins and could break apps if developers haven’t prepared. Starting March 11th, Page admins will no longer be able to install new FMBL apps and developers will no longer be able to create them. Instead, they are to develop and install iframe apps.

Also, starting March 12th, all applications must use POST for Canvas to encrypt User IDs to protect the privacy of users. Today Facebook outlined a clever plan where the migration will go live gradually so unprepared apps will only break for a few minutes a day at first.

Facebook has made repeated announcements of these changes, displayed them on the Developer Roadmap. and offered documentation and testing options in an effort to minimize breakage and not surprise any admins or developers.

FBML Deprecation

Announced in August, Friday’s shift to from FBML to iframe apps was planned to let Page admins offer richer functionality without forcing users to leave their Page. Admins have been able to install iframe apps since February 10th, but won’t be able to install anything else starting Friday.

To change their apps from FBML to iframe, developers can go into the Page Tab settings of the Developer app and modify the Page Tab Type.

The change will allow the same applications to be run on their own or as Page tab apps. Facebook says it will also allow developers to program all Facebook apps in the “same simple, standards-based web programming model (HTML, JavaScript, and CSS).” Engineers won’t have to learn any Facebook-specific language to create Page tab apps.

However, FBML was more accessible to novice programmers in some ways, since it used uniform code snippets. Therefore, it will now take more traditional coding experience to create Page tab apps.

For those without that experience, Wildfire Interactive and some independent developers have released apps that make it easy to create an iframe welcome tab for Pages, while Involver and Buddy Media have provided some analysis of the new capabilities and policies of iframe Page tabs.

POST for Canvas Deadline

On November 23rd, Facebook released a solution to the problem of third-parties gaining access to User IDs when they are passed in an HTTP Referrer Header. This issue led to a lot of negative press about Facebook’s privacy and security, even though the User ID only provides publicly available information.

The solution, called POST for Canvas, has been available for testing since November 23rd, left beta and became the default for new applications on December 10th, and becomes mandatory on March 12th.

At 12pm PST that day, Facebook will turn the migration on for five minutes before turning it off. Apps that haven’t prepared for the migration will break, but then come back to life, sending a hard reminder to developers to adopt Post for Canvas. Each subsequent day the migration will go live for increasing amounts of time until it in effect around the clock.

To test the migration before the 12th, developers can go to the Advanced tab of the Developer app, and enable POST for Canvas under Migrations.

 

Highlights This Week from the Inside Network Job Board: Digital Chocolate, Arkadium, Diversion, & More

Posted: 09 Mar 2011 01:00 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 Digital Chocolate, Arkadium, Diversion Inc, EverTold, Funcom, NaturalMotion, and Jagex Games Studios.

 

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.

Facebook Videos Moved to the Profile’s Photos Tab

Posted: 09 Mar 2011 12:24 PM PST

A thread on Quora from Evan Priestley, an engineer with Facebook, outlines how the company has moved videos from its own separate tab to the photos tab on profiles. Pages continue to have a separate video tab with the new layout. The change may temporarily make videos difficult to find for some users.

Priestley responded to a Facebook user’s question about the whereabouts of their videos and with the new information.

Previously the videos were accesible via a link under the profile picture and a video tab at the top of the old profile. Now a user's videos may be accessed by clicking on the photos tab, then "see all" then clicking on "video." Here’s the new profile

Videos on Facebook are costly to serve, not tagged as often as photos, reduce cross-site browsing and are not as popular as photos, so burying them may be somewhat in Facebook’s interest. However, many users didn’t have any uploaded or tagged videos, so giving them a separate section needlessly cluttered profile navigation in some cases.

Priestley concludes his answer stating “this is an intentional part of our meticulously orchestrated master plan”, so the change could pave the way for a forthcoming change to media browsing.

Insto.re Lets Local Businesses Offer Instant Rewards for Facebook Likes

Posted: 09 Mar 2011 11:04 AM PST

Momentus Media has released a new tool called Insto.re that allows brick and mortar businesses to offer customers an in-store reward for Liking their Facebook Page via mobile phone. Business owners set up a deal such as “Free Cookie with Facebook Like”, then customers visit a unique Insto.re URL to view the deal, permit the Facebook app, Like the displayed Page, and show a confirmation screen to the clerk to redeem their reward.

Insto.re is a free, fast, simple but powerful way for local businesses to increase their Facebook fan count and collect email addresses.

Momentus Media has previously released several other lightweight apps to help businesses improve their Facebook presence, including Community Health Grader for analyzing fan engagement, and Badges.

Business owners visit the Insto.re site to set up their reward, select the Page they want to drive Likes to, enter their store’s name and the details of the deal, select whether they want to collect user email addresses, and create a suffix for their unique URL. There’s no rules for how deals can be structured, so businesses can offer a reward for just a Like, or a Like and a purchase.

Once an owner saves the offer, they’ll receive their unique URL and the option to print a table tent card that explains the deal. Owners coud put the table tent in their store, or create their own signage to promote the deal.

After users have begun redeeming the deal by visiting the URL, following its instructions, and showing the confirmation screen to the clerk, owners can export a .CSV file of email addresses of these users if they’ve chosen to collect them.

The whole process of setting up a deal is intuitive and takes less than two minutes. Other services such as Likify that require users to scan a QR code with their mobile device to Like a Page are more clumsy, and don’t let businesses provide an incentive for Liking.

Insto.re provides a low-cost way to acquire Likes. By converting existing customers into fans, businesses can connect and publish updates to people who they know are already interested in spending money with them. Insto.re has the potential to turn the occasional customer into a regular.

For more strategies and tools that can help your business gain fans, visit the the Facebook Marketing Bible, Inside Network's complete guide to marketing on Facebook.

Badoo, Video, Luck, Mobile and Connect on This Week’s Top 20 Growing Facebook Apps by DAU

Posted: 09 Mar 2011 07:49 AM PST

A wide variety of applications composed our list of the top 20 growing Facebook apps this week. Most of the growth for the non-game apps came from outside of the U.S. Our list was compiled based on AppData, our data tracking service covering traffic growth for apps on Facebook, and covers apps that grew the most in the past week.

Top Gainers This Week

Name DAU Gain Gain,%
1. Badoo 3,558,672 +736,988 +26%
2. flipboard 445,923 +351,998 +375%
3. Windows Live Messenger 14,465,795 +318,610 +2%
4. Monopoly Millionaires 535,313 +316,874 +145%
5. Profile Top Banner 225,916 +211,403 +1,457%
6. Daily Horoscope 602,675 +201,059 +50%
7. Sanal Video 416,485 +159,666 +62%
8. Galaxy Online II – Most Competitive Strategy Game 137,990 +137,852 +99,893%
9. HTC Sense 4,795,539 +129,425 +3%
10. Mafia Wars Game 2,323,704 +104,345 +5%
11. The Fortune Teller 1,094,066 +103,206 +10%
12. การวิเคราะห์สมอง 100,801 +100,785 +629,906%
13. Zuma Blitz 1,109,259 +90,321 +9%
14. Gowalla 113,458 +85,468 +305%
15. Snaptu 1,213,135 +76,087 +7%
16. Family Tree 274,439 +73,726 +37%
17. Dragons of Atlantis 324,214 +66,967 +26%
18. Yahoo! 6,493,267 +64,669 +1%
19. Luck Daily! 515,717 +64,046 +14%
20. Frases Diarias 638,293 +63,751 +11%

Dating app Badoo topped our list this week with 737,000 new DAU, showing this growth in Mexico, France and Italy primarily. Flipboard, which bills itself the "first social magazine" grew by 352,000 DAU this week. Then, Windows Live Messenger, a Facebook integration, saw 318,600 DAU this week with steady growth almost equally among France, the United Kingdom, Mexico, Italy and Canada.

A few other Facebook Connect integrations included HTC Sense with 129,400 DAU this week. Gowalla saw 85,500 DAU. Then there was mobile app site Snaptu which grew by 76,000 DAU; users in Indonesia and Mexico seem to be excited about downloading apps such as Mashable, Facebook and Twitter to their phones. Yahoo's Connect app grew by about 65,000 DAU.
There were a group of miscellaneous apps.

Profile Top Banner, another version of these types of popular apps, had 211,400 DAU this week; the app posts a photo album to the stream, tagging the user in each of the five photos. Daily Horoscope grew mostly in Turkey with 201,000 DAU. Another Turkish app, Sanal Video, an app displaying a variety of videos to be shared to the stream, grew by 159,700 DAU this week.

Frases Diarias (Daily Phrases) grew almost totally in Mexico by 63,800 DAU; the app posts quotes to a users' stream. Finally, การวิเคราะห์สมอง is a Thai app that claims to analyze the brains of a user's friends; the app saw about 101,000 DAU this week. Growth seems to come mostly from photos posted in an album to a users' stream that tags their friends.

An interesting app on our list this week, Family Tree, has potential for growth mostly among a users' family network; it grew by 73,700 DAU this week. The app asks for lots of permissions, but then asks users to add family members to their family tree; when this is done, a story posts to the family members' Wall and sends an app request to them. The app also searches your network for family members, suggests them as adds, and posts another notification on their Wall. There are also game-like elements to the app, such as being able to earn badges for adding photos or commenting on photos.