Inside Facebook
Inside Facebook |
- Facebook Roundup: IPO, Privacy, Like Button, Eventbrite, Acquisitions, Winklevoss Bros, Baseball and More
- Bing’s Facebook-Enhanced Results Now Appear More Frequently on a Wider Range of Searches
- Update to Facebook Promotion Guideline Changes: Restrictions on Some Categories Such as Gambling Remain
- Gifts, Video, Coupons, Quizzes, Friends and More on This Week’s Top 20 Emerging Facebook Apps
| Posted: 20 May 2011 10:45 PM PDT
Facebook, Others Oppose California Privacy Bill – A proposed bill in the California legislature, SB 242 the Social Networking Privacy Act, would change the information that companies like Facebook could provide about users under 18. Facebook and other tech companies submitted a formal letter of opposition in response. Study: Like Button Gathers User Data – The Wall Street Journal published a story on a report the publication completed on social widgets such as Facebook's Like button. The report notes that such widgets appear on 20-25% of the 1,000 most-visited sites and that Facebook claims it anonymizes this data, deleting it within 90 days. Facebook's Acquisitions Mostly for Talent – A New York Times story scrutinizes Facebook's acquisitions (a long-running trend that we’ve covered in detail before), specifically looking at whether the company paid too much in some cases. The story notes that the $47 million FriendFeed acquisition cost about $4 million per employee and Drop.io brought in only one employee to the company for several million dollars. The point is talent. Engineers today “are worth half a million to a million” dollars, explained Vaughan Smith in the interview.
Facebook Wants Help Section to Go Viral – Facebook is asking users who visit the site's Help section to share information about how to avoid malicious script scams. [Image via AllFacebook] New Technology to Fight Child Porn – Facebook is using the Microsoft-created PhotoDNA program to fight child pornography amongst the 200 million images uploaded to the social network daily.
Facebook on GigaOm's Structure 50 List – GigaOm's Structure 50 list of companies influencing the cloud includes Facebook, in light of its advances in server and database hardware and software. You can find out more about the Structure conference here.
Fan Appz Launches Fan Tabz – Fan Appz launched a new custom tab application, Fan Tabz, this week for $19.95 a month. Baseball Fans Share Team Love on Facebook - Facebook's Data Team wrote an interesting blog this week detailing the different ways in which fans share their love for baseball teams on Facebook. Winklevoss Bros Lose Another Court Move – The Winklevoss brothers, who have been suing Mark Zuckerberg over the founding of Facebook for several years, lost a bid to have their case heard again in the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Bing’s Facebook-Enhanced Results Now Appear More Frequently on a Wider Range of Searches Posted: 20 May 2011 04:06 PM PDT Earlier this week, Microsoft’s search engine Bing significantly deepened its Instant Personalization integration with Facebook. It launched several new social features for its web search, shopping, travel, and toolbar products; and it began triggering the display of social content much more frequently. By improving result quality with both the data of a user’s friends and the Facebook user base at large, Bing is positioning itself as the search engine of choice for when people need social reassurance to make a decision. We sat down with the Director of Bing, Stefan Weitz to ask him a few questions about the motives behind the update. We’ll follow that with an in-depth look at the product changes. Q&A on Social as the Future of Ecommerce Search
Stefan Weitz, Director of Bing: Decision search is moving from exploration to active conversation because 80% of people delay making a purchase online until they can talk to a friend. Core search stuff has been taken care of by intelligent organization. But how do people sort through all the links and make a decision? You do all the research, but at the last minute you walk away from the purchase process because you’re not convinced until you get a social recommendation. When you want to tap into that info you have to go to a bunch of different places. Whether it’s just Facebook that solves that problem, or if it’s Quora and other sites, behavior is already moving in that direction (of seeking advice online rather than offline). But no one does a good job of pulling it all together into search. IF: What has changed that’s made this possible but also necessary? SW: Stuff that was previosuly in your brain is now in a format that machines can read. Friend connections are a new way of thinking about ranking search. Meanwhile, humans are creating 5 billion gigabytes of data every two days, and machines are losing their ability to categorize it all. How can PageRank handle a Yfrog image? It probably doesn’t have a title, or caption, or anything else that could help index it. But if a friend Likes it, that’s important. IF: Why is the social content appearing more frequently now? SW: Honestly, it was light before. You didn’t see much of it. Now it’s gone up a ton, you’ll see it a lot more. It triggers more because we have higher coverage [across products]. Its more than just Likes now. We think of people as having characteristics and attributes, not just actions. Now we’re considering what other meta data can we use that people will give us access to so we can continue to personalize search. Improvements to Bing’s Existing Facebook IntegrationBing began its Facebook integration by indexing Page updates and publicly visible links posted by users in June 2010. In October of that year, it partnered with Facebook to offer Instant Personalization of Bing search results so users could could see Likes by friends of search result objects, and their network connections to Facebook users found through a name search. However, the search result Likes were displayed very infrequently, so some hardly noticed the change. Microsoft also released the Bing Bar toolbar, which allowed users to view the Facebook news feed and their notification from any tab, but it didn’t offer an easy way to share web pages and links copied into its Facebook publisher weren’t formatted as they are on Facebook.com. Bing has now fixed these issues and greatly expanded the functionality of its Facebook integration. As Weitz said, social content now appears in search results much more frequently. Meanwhile, the Bing Bar now has a “Universal Like Button” — a one click way to share the currently viewed webpage to the news feed with the same rich story formatting as if one had pasted the link into the Facebook.com publisher.
Search With More Social ContentAlong with more frequently showing you Likes by friends of things represented in top search results, Bing now actually personalizes the rank of results based on these Likes. Weitz tells us that “based on the actions of friends, results that would be on page two or three are pulled onto page one.” Even if no friends have Liked a result, in some cases it will display the total number of Facebook users that have Liked it, helping users make decisions about topics outside the expertise of their network. In one of the most useful new additions to Bing, frequently Liked webpages from within popular websites will appear beside their Like count underneath a result, allowing users to sift through today’s content heavy blogs and community sites. For instance, articles from a news site or recipes from a cooking site that have been Liked by friends or many other users are now much easier to discover.
Related updates from Facebook Pages now appear in general search instead of being isolated in the dedicated “Social” search tab. As Pages become a sort of news ticker and deals distribution platform for many brands, Page updates are becoming valuable content to surface. Bing Augments People,Travel, and Shopping Search With Friend Profile Characteristics and Sharing OptionsWhile before users could search for people through Bing, the results were no more helpful in finding the right “Bob Smith” than Facebook’s own search engine. Now people search results display profile data visible to the searcher, such as current city, workplace, and education history if its public or is to visible to “friends of friends” and they have a friend in common. Similarly, Bing Travel searches will display the friends that live or previously lived in a city that’s been searched for. In an innovative use of the ability for owners of Like buttons to publish news feed updates to those that click them, users who Like flight results between two cities will receive feed stories about about deals on those flights. Users can also share Travel Wish Lists with friends. Bing Shopping has also rolled out it’s previously announced shareable product comparisons so users can seek advice from friends.
Where Social Search Can Go From HereBing’s latest social additions could make it a sensible tool for people inquiring about things outside their comfort zone. If I don’t know anything about LCD TVs, but want to buy one, Bing could help me discover reputable brands and popular sources of tech hardware reviews, or share the choices I’m comparing with my friends. There’s still more to do, though. For instance, I might see that one friend Likes one tech hardware review blog, and another friend Likes a different blog. Perhaps Bing or another social search engine could analyze the full set of Likes of those friends, and determine if one is an expert on technology because they’ve Liked several other tech brands or publications. This friend’s Like could then be weighted more heavily or shown more prominently. There’s also the question of those who really don’t want a social search experience. Now, even if a Bing user doesn’t have a Facebook account they’ll still see anonymized data about the Likes of the general Facebook user base. By providing an option to completely opt out of seeing Facebook data in search results, Bing could continue aggressively integrating social data without alienating those who don’t believe in the wisdom of the crowd. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Posted: 20 May 2011 12:39 PM PDT Facebook made a significant update to its promotions guidelines last week, deleting blanket clauses that previously prohibited the promotion of some types of products and the targeting of minors plus those in some countries. The company is basically removing itself from being a middle-man between marketers and widely varying laws that apply across the world. However, some promotions now admissible by the promotion guidelines are still prohibited by Facebook’s other governing documents, including its Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, Advertising Guidelines, and Platform Policies. Though the change was designed to simplify the promotion guidelines, marketers must comply with all documents, not just that one. We’ve confirmed with Facebook the points below, as well as that enforcement hasn’t changed, and the alterations to the promotions guidelines do apply to all channels, including Page updates, applications, and ads. Some Minors Can Receive Promotions Advertisers no longer need to request exceptions for promotions targeted to minors, as long as they continue to follow all laws and other regulations in the jurisdiction where they’re running the ads. This means that if a marketer wants to target a promotion to minors in a country that allows such promotions, Facebook won’t stand in their way. However, the US Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act requires that all web sites that collect information about users preclude those under 13 years of age, and Facebook does comply with this law around the world (although note that Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg would like to change it to reach younger users — who are widely observed to be on the site, lying about their ages). Despite Many Ongoing Restrictions, More Opportunities for Previously Prohibited Categories Alcohol, tobacco, gambling, dairy products, prescription drugs and gasoline were previously banned from being either the consumer prize, the marketer objective of the promotion, or both. That wording has been removed from the promotion guidelines, but most of the restrictions remain due to clauses in the other governing documents. Though certain states and countries prohibit promotion of these products, marketers are free to run campaigns endorsing or offering if local laws and Facebook’s other documents permit. Take the case of gambling promotions. They are allowed by the promotion guidelines, Section III.A.3 of the Platform Policies bans them “without limitation,” but the Ad Guidelines provide a caveat: “without authorization from Facebook.” Therefore, an app couldn’t promote gambling, but if an advertiser gets permission from Facebook to run a gambling ad (provided that it follows all relevant other laws), it could point to an off-Facebook gambling promotion. However, since the Platform Policies cover all social plugins and other parts of the platform, a gambling promotion site could not use Like buttons to get users to share gambling promotions back to Facebook. Marketers looking to target minors or those in restriction-heavy countries, or seeking to promote the previously restricted products should carefully cross-check all of Facebook’s governing documents and the local laws to ensure their campaigns aren’t subject to enforcement by Facebook or legal repercussions from local authorities. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Gifts, Video, Coupons, Quizzes, Friends and More on This Week’s Top 20 Emerging Facebook Apps Posted: 20 May 2011 08:21 AM PDT
Aside from the usual dose of Turkish video applications, there were some new and interesting titles on our list of the top 20 emerging Facebook apps by monthly active user. In addition, there was a virtual gift app, Involver's coupon app for Pages, another custom tab app, an explicitly sexual app, a Turkish sweepstakes app, a friend app and a quiz creation app. The apps on our list grew from between 121,300 and 490,000 MAU. Our list is compiled using AppData, our data tracking service covering traffic growth for apps on Facebook, and covers those that gained the most users in the past seven days. Top Gainers This Week
The most interesting application on the list this week for its aggressive viral tactics was Quiz Creator, with 126,300 MAU. The app may be used by individuals, not just Page owners, and allows users to create customized quizzes. You get to chose whether it's a personality or competitive quiz, name the quiz, add a description, choose the language, whether men/women/friends/everyone can take it, add photos, create your 5 (or more) questions and add photos, create your answers, create the responses to your quiz results, then publish to the stream. What's interesting here is that the app appears to publish a feed story every single time you take an action within the app, such that at the end, there are literally nine feed stories that have been generated about your quiz. We expect Facebook to take action soon.
Elsewhere on the list, Turkish video apps this week included Akıllı Tv Video with 190,900 MAU, Sohbeti Arkadaşlık with a 155,400 MAU and VideoGezegeni with 146,800 MAU. The apps are similar in their mechanics in that they allow users to view, Like, share and comment on videos; VideoGezegeni automatically posts daily videos to your feed, while Sohbeti Arkadaşlık is an overtly sexual app that publishes vulgar videos to your stream upon use. Pieces of Flair is an app that promises to let its mostly female users create buttons, send gifts to friends and otherwise use virtual gifts, growing by 175,200 MAU. Involver's Coupons for Pages app grew by 170,800 MAU but is only available to Involver customers to create coupons for their Pages. The My Tab app, however, grew by 136,400 MAU and allows any Page administrator to create a customized tab for their Page.
Finally, what appears to be a Turkish sweepstakes app, Yıldız Cellocanlar, grew by 150,100 MAU, partly by publishing a feed story with its use. And, the Friends Who Always Be There For Me is a friend app that grew by 121,300 MAU and publishes a photo with a user's most frequently interacted with friends, tagging them all, thus increasing virality. |
Facebook IPO "Inevitable" – Facebook's COO Sheryl Sandberg said this week that 
Eventbrite Raises $50M – Eventbrite, a startup that leverages social networks to sell tickets, 
Jive Facebook Connector Syncs Discussion Forums – Jive Software has 
Inside Facebook: Why is Bing pushing to get social integrations so deep into decision-based search?
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