Inside Facebook
Inside Facebook |
- Facebook Roundup: Winklevoss Twins, Canada, LivingSocial, SocialMedia, Messages and Bebo
- Six More Ad Providers Join Facebook’s Approved List for Platform Developers
- Why Friend.ly’s Question and Answer Facebook Connect App Gained Millions of Users
- Weddings, Hearts, Page Tools, Videos and Mobile on This Week’s Top 20 Emerging Facebook Apps by MAU
| Facebook Roundup: Winklevoss Twins, Canada, LivingSocial, SocialMedia, Messages and Bebo Posted: 15 Apr 2011 06:36 PM PDT
The judges said the twins had a team of lawyers on hand sufficient to help them negotiate a fair deal at the time. Meanwhile, a lawsuit in New York filed by Paul Ceglia claiming that he owns half of Zuckerberg’s stake in Facebook continues this week. He has refiled his lawsuit with what he says are emails between him and Zuckerberg in 2003 and 2004, proving his ownership in the company. Ceglia has also landed a high-profile law firm, DLA Piper to represent him. Facebook, however, has continued to assert that his claims are false — see our coverage from earlier this week for more details. [Image via Zimbio]
Facebook's CPC Advertising Increasingly Competitive – Efficient Frontier, an online performance marketer, reported that Facebook's advertising is becoming increasingly competitive, especially CPC advertising, which has increased 40% quarter by quarter. Efficient Frontier's "State of Digital Marketing Report for Q1 2011" also found that advertiser demand for Facebook's ads increased, expanding 300% over a year ago. The company predicted that Facebook's ad volume would double over the next year. Facebook Fastest Social Network – AlertSite reported this week that Facebook is the fastest-loading social network, in terms of speed, at an average of .75 seconds.
More on Messages Infrastructure – Facebook's Engineering team wrote a note explaining the infrastructure changes that took place to accommodate the company's new Messages product. Canadian Court Dismisses Suit Against Facebook – A class-action lawsuit filed against Facebook in Canada over privacy issues revolving around privacy setting and terms of use changes was dismissed. Facebook's lawyers argued that Quebec courts don't have jurisdiction in the case because the terms of service asks users to submit future litigation in Santa Clara, California District Court. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Six More Ad Providers Join Facebook’s Approved List for Platform Developers Posted: 15 Apr 2011 04:34 PM PDT Facebook has added six more companies to its list of ad providers that have agreed to its terms for working with developers on the platform, since we last looked at the end of March. Some are better known than others, and include in alphabetical order, the amusingly named Appflation, Deal United, EasyAds, NextPerformance, Secco Ads, and Unified. Ad providers, whether online ad networks, in-game offer providers, or others in the ecosystem, need to agree to follow rules set by Facebook around how they access data about users, the formats they use to target, and other criteria intended to protect users as well as Facebook’s ad-driven business model. Google continues to be absent, most likely because the company aggregates and analyzes user data through its AdSense performance ad network, in ways that Facebook does not allow. The total number of approved developers has now reached 83, a wide mix of companies, some of whom have been quite active on Facebook and some of whom have not been. A few more details about the new additions: Appflation provides very few details about itself, Deal United is a long-time offer provider based in Europe, EasyAds is a Bulgarian online ad network, NextPerformance does online ad retargeting (with a French focus), Secco Ads is also an ad network, and Unified has not yet launched. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Why Friend.ly’s Question and Answer Facebook Connect App Gained Millions of Users Posted: 15 Apr 2011 09:19 AM PDT At the end of March, Facebook Connect app friend.ly, a question and answer site designed to help you get to know your friends better and make new friends, hit a sudden growth spurt. It gained 2.3 million monthly active users and 247,ooo daily active users between March 24th and April 13th, according to AppData, our data service tracking growth and traffic for apps and developers We spoke with friend.ly’s co-founder and chief executive Ed Baker to find out what changes the app made to inspire this growth, how the company is working to accomodate demand, and how it plans to monetize its audience. Baker explained how the growth was aided by the addition of a more compelling mix of questions, that scaling has been a serious challenge, and that it plans to offer premium features to help users get noticed and meet new people.
When users Facebook Connect to friend.ly, the site pulls their friend and Like lists, allowing it to pose questions to the user about the people and things they care about. Other social Q&A services such as Badoo, whose explosive growth we covered last month, focus on asking questions about a user’s friends. Friend.ly’s integration of on the interest graph allows it to know if you Like “Skiing” and therefore ask relevant questions such as “Where’s your favorite place to ski?” This ensures each user’s experience is personalized, leading to more engagement and sharing
Baker tells us that friend.ly’s 10-person Mountain View, California team had kept their heads down “focusing on product for the past year, and just a month ago started focusing on growth.” Friend.ly analyzed data about what questions were being answered, shared to Facebook, and commented on the most to determine what topics it should add more questions to. It also noticed how different types of questions led users to share answers to their own wall, the walls of friends, and Page walls, and worked to intersperse these question types so users could share multiple answers per session without clogging up a certain channel. The company noticed that the speed and reliability of the site were proportional to engagement, so it strived to make the site process answers and ask new questions as quickly as possible through daily infrastructure improvements. All of these changes combined to result in sizable growth, especially amongst users in the US and U.K.
But now the friend.ly team is scrambling to keep the site up and loading swiftly, spending the $5 million in funding it received from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Balderton Capital and angel investors including Ron Conway, Jeff Clavier, Naval Ravikant, and Michael Birch. Performance has dipped slightly over the past few days, with some pages loading slowly, bugs arising, and the service amassing a backlog of user Like lists that still need to be processed before those users can be asked questions about their interests. Service is stabilizing now, though, and the company can start turning its attention to how it will generate revenue — something it has yet to tackle. Baker tells us that similar to some dating sites, friend.ly may soon give users the option to pay for added visibility, the ability to send messages to people who aren’t their friends, or know who has been browsing their profile. What sets friend.ly apart from sites like Zoosk and Match.com is that those sites are specifically for dating, and therefore have to pay a lot for advertising in order to gain new users. In contrast friend.ly’s less overtly romantic purpose and the use of Facebook’s viral channel help it gain users organically. Some might assume that friend.ly would work better as a Facebook canvas app where virality is close at hand than as a Connect site, but Baker wanted the ability to customize the look and feel of the product. Friend.ly also wanted the option to easily pull in information from other social networks such as Twitter. Perhaps surprisingly, friend.ly doesn’t have a plan to use the wealth of data it’s stockpiling as a core part of its monetization strategy. Instead, Baker believes the product is a success if it can use that data to lead people to become Facebook friends, or even friends offline. “The way people become friends in real life is inefficient. It can be fun and interesting to meet people online, but most dating sites aren’t that fun.” By creating a informal, fast-paced atmosphere where users can meet by asking each other compelling questions, friend.ly has created a service that Facebook users enjoy, and may be willing to pay for. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Weddings, Hearts, Page Tools, Videos and Mobile on This Week’s Top 20 Emerging Facebook Apps by MAU Posted: 15 Apr 2011 08:23 AM PDT
We compile this list with AppData, our data tracking service covering traffic growth for apps on Facebook and covers apps that grew the most in the past week, ending at between 100,000 and 1 million MAU. Top Gainers This Week
A Turkish virtual good app topped our list this week; Send Gift grew by 634,300 MAU by allowing users to send heart-shaped gifts to their friends' Walls. Then there were two more Turkish apps for videos. Harika Videolar grew by 376,600 MAU and Video Galerisi by 301,700 MAU. The two apps allow users to view, share and Like videos, consequently generating feed stories.
Interestingly, there was about a handful of Page administrator apps on our list this week. Welcome Tab for Pages grew by 241,300 MAU and allows users to create a custom welcome tab for their Pages. FBML Tab Maker added 188,000 MAU by allowing users to create customized FBML tabs. Hy.ly Welcome Tab app saw 101,900 MAU with a welcome tab generator app that helps Page admins create a tab asking visitors to Like their Page. Finally Profiline bakanlar, Seni arayanlar kim ? saw 100,700 MAU this week; the app appears to be a Turkish Page admin tool.
The Movie List Challenges app, which allows users to complete quizzes on which movies they've seen and publish to the stream with inviting questions, grew by 237,600 MAU. LiveProfile provides a cross-platform messenger service for iPhone, Android and BlackBerry devices; it grew by 205,900 MAU. The Polish app Wedding Clock was interesting because it claimed to predict the future; the app grew by 107,800 MAU. The app asks 15 questions to determine your wedding date — such as age, sex, favorite color — and publishes a feed story telling you the anticipated day of your wedding. |
Winklevoss Twins Lose Appeal, Facebook Legal Saga Continues – The Winklevoss twins, who had most recently sued Facebook claiming that the company hid information from them when they settled for $65 million, were told by a panel of 
LivingSocial Buys SocialMedia – LivingSocial bought SocialMedia, a social advertising network, for $3 million in LivingSocial stock this week, 
Bebo Tries Redesign to Stop Traffic Slide – Bebo is working on a 
| You are subscribed to email updates from Inside Facebook To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |