| Facebook Adds Reverse Chronological Sorting to Comments Box Plugin, Now on 300,000 Sites Posted: 29 Jun 2011 07:11 PM PDT This afternoon Facebook announced two updates to its Comments Box plugin for third-party websites, along with the fact that 300,000 sites have integrated the plugin since its March 1st release. Users can select to sort comment reels by reverse chronological order as well as by chronological order and by Facebook’s “social ranking” algorithm. This will help users when following comments in real-time is important, such as on sites discussing currently airing television shows or sporting events. 
Facebook also confirmed the addition of the “Boost Comment” button we covered last week, which allows moderators to select certain comments to push to the top of a reel. The Comments Plugin launched March 1st and had been integrated into 50,000 sites by mid-April. Today’s announcement of the 300,000 site milestone indicates adoption has accelerated in the last few months. This is a sign that the plugin has matured passed some initial concerns about bugginess and lack of features and is now a more viable comments solution with added distribution benefits. Users can now click on a downward facing arrow when viewing the Comments Box plugin to reveal sorting options. They can use reverse chronological sorting to see the latest feedback to a post. Alternatively, they can sort by chronological order if initial responses to a blog post or content are what is most important to them, or sort by social ranking to first see comments with lots of Likes and replies from commenters with good reputations. Facebook’s Director of Media Partnerships, Justin Osofsky notes in the announcement that “many partners have reported significant increases in referral traffic and engagement” from using the Comments Box plugin. Adoption may continue to accelerate as current implementations serve to raise awareness of the plugin.  |
| Facebook Partners With American Express to Get Small Businesses Hooked on Buying Ads Posted: 29 Jun 2011 01:08 PM PDT Facebook has partnered with American Express to let AmEx cardholders redeem their Membership Rewards points for Facebook Ads credit. Card holders can receive $50 in ad credit for 6,750 Membership Rewards points which they earn for each dollar the spend and can be redeemed on American Express OPEN’s Facebook Page or the Membership Rewards site. The partnership values the reward points at $0.0074 each – a significantly better rate than the $0.0050 per point American Express users can get when they redeem for traveller’s cheques. This favorable rate is likely designed to help Facebook get businesses hooked on its ads, while increasing the relevance of the Membership Rewards program to American Express’ customers. 
The announcement comes just a week after location-based service Foursquare announced a partnership with American Express to offer cardholders big bonuses when they check in and make purchases at select businesses. For example, cardholders who check in and spend $50 at Sports Authority get a $20 credit added to their AmEx account. With virtual currency such as Facebook Credits powering new purchase incentive and loyalty programs, American Express appears determined not to be left behind. Its partnerships with Facebook and Foursquare could boost appeal of its services to both younger entrepreneurs conducting marketing on the social network, as well as early adopters who make purchase decisions based on discounts sourced through their mobile devices. 
The two companies worked together last year to launch American Express’ “Small Business Saturday” campaign where businesses could sign up for financial services to gain a $100 Facebook Ads credit. American Express also offers similar deals for free ad credit with Bing and Yahoo. For Facebook, the American Express partnership could help it introduce its Ads product to small businesses, one of the financial service company’s core client bases which it handles through its American Express OPEN division. A recent study showed that only 22% of local business owners had used Facebook Ads despite 94% being aware of the marketing channel. This indicates that there’s plenty of runway for the revenue of Facebook’s self-serve ad business to grow if it can attract the long-tail of small and local businesses. 
If American Express card holders find the ad credit earned through their Membership Rewards redemptions help their business, they might ramp up spend or at least keep it constant over time, quickly helping Facebook recoup any initial loss through the promotion. To increase the likelihood that the initial ad runs of these new clients go well, Facebook and American Express are providing guides to ads tool best practices. If Facebook can adequately educate the new advertisers secured through the partnership have a positive experience with Facebook ads, it could have success converting cardholders into long time advertisers, and it might seek to establish more partnerships like this one to extend ad credits to small businesses.  |
| New This Week on the Inside Network Job Board: Acquinity Interactive, SolutionSet, Seismic Games, Atakama Labs and More Posted: 29 Jun 2011 12:18 PM PDT The Inside Network Job Board is dedicated to providing you with the best job opportunities across social and mobile application platforms. Here are this week's highlights from the Inside Network Job Board, including positions at Acquinity Interactive, SolutionSet, Seismic Games, Atakama Labs, Spooky Cool Labs, Atari, Voxer and Wild Needle. 
Listings on the Inside Network Job Board are distributed to readers of Inside Social Games, Inside Facebook and Inside Mobile Apps 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 Launches Graph API Explorer for Testing and Revamps Developer App for Speed Posted: 29 Jun 2011 12:00 PM PDT Facebook released significant improvements to its Platform developer toolset this morning with the introduction of the Graph API Explorer and a new version of the Developer app. The Graph API Explorer lets developers make and test API calls and see formatted results in-line, preview extended permissions dialogs, explore connections between objects, and more. The enhanced Developer app allows for quick access to apps, important app info, Getting Started guides, and roles management. These changes should make the Facebook Platform more inviting to new developers, while streamlining workflow for veterans, especially those administrating multiple apps. 
Graph API Explorer Before the launch of the Graph API Explorer, it could be a bit difficult for developers to get their bearings in Facebook’s programmatic interface. They could turn to third-party API testing consoles such as Apigee, or sort through documentation and forums, but the Graph API Explorer offers an official, more visually-oriented introduction to building on the Graph API. When developers visit the Graph API Explorer, they’ll first see a GET call for their personal ID. From there they can click links to view an object’s connections, and view detailed descriptions of various fields. The ability to click instead of type to explore connections between objects makes the interface especially easy for new developers. User data, friends data, and extended permissions access tokens can be generated to view private data and test APIs, and developers see the same permissions dialog their users would see. Developers can switch between different Graph API URLs and between GET, POST, and DELETE to both experiment and actually make changes. IDs in the formatted results returned by calls can be clicked to quickly navigate to details of that object. 
The Explorer can’t currently be used to create or test with designated test users, but Facebook may add some of this functionality in the future. In the comments of the announcement blog post, Facebook’s Namita Gupta explains that photo uploading also can’t be tested with the Graph API Explorer as there is “no way to support multipart/form-data in the parameters but we are working on this.” Overall, though, the developer response to the tool has been positive so far. The Graph API Explorer could help increase self-reliance amongst Platform developers by allowing them to more easily test their way through than seek help from their peers. This could also reduce the incidence support requests to Facebook’s Platform team and erroneous bug reports. The ability to share a permalink to one’s current view of the Graph API Explorer, as one can from Apigee’s console, could make the development process more social by letting developers show their problems to others and receive advice. Streamlined Developer App The design of the Developer app, which allows developers to create new apps and manage settings of their existing ones, has stayed mostly stable since 2009. As Facebook app development became more of a business with developers controlling multiple apps and needing to manage large teams with various roles, the original decline became clunky. It also didn’t properly serve as a portal to documentation that could help new developers. 
The redesigned Developer app begins a full roll out today starting with a limited set of developers. Its dashboard displays one’s most recently viewed apps, and developers can search using a typeahead to go directly to a desired app. Selecting an apps brings up important information about it including its app ID, app secret, and various URLs. Facebook also says that it has ”reorganized the sections within the Developer App to reduce redundant fields.” Getting Started guides to apps on Facebook, mobile, and websites can be accessed from a navigation menu. Facebook has simplified the process of assigning and managing administrator, developer, tester, and Insights user roles. Speed has also been increased and workflow improved by “eliminating inefficient operations and data fetches.” While none of this functionality is actually new, the condensed architecture of the app should promote faster navigation, allowing developers to focus on building their apps rather than the process of managing their settings. The release of these new developer tools should serve to improve Facebook’s standing with the developer community. This is especially convenient considering the recent complaints of unfair treatment by some developers whose apps were suddenly disabled last week when Facebook modified its auto-enforcement system to be more aggressive.  |
| RockMelt Raises $30 Million Following Facebook Partnership Posted: 29 Jun 2011 11:07 AM PDT RockMelt has upped its bet that there’s a market for social web browsers, announcing a $30 million second round of funding from an all-star list of past and new investors. This comes two weeks after the company launched a version of its browser that tightly integrates with Facebook, thanks to a partnership between the two companies. However, RockMelt doesn’t have that many users yet. On Facebook, for example, we count 384,000 monthly active users, with slightly under half of those currently coming back every day, according to our AppData tracking service. You can see a spike in users following the June 14th announcement of RockMelt’s official partnership with Facebook, though the daily active user count has dropped back to the pre-announcement level. 
So, it’s the engagement of its current users that’s interesting, and that’s what investor Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz stresses in a blog post on the funding today, via the stats below. - Over 6 hours of use per person per day
- Average of 3 chat conversations per user through RockMelt each day
- 60% of users 35 and under are active chatters, and they each send an average of 65 messages every day and 71% of the youngest cohort use chat.
- Average of 20 uses of the information flow features per person per day
- 80% of searches go through the browser's search interface rather than a search site
- 56% of users are age 24 and under, 80% under 35.
Horowitz’s partner is not coincidentally Marc Andreessen, cofounder of seminal browser company Netscape, and a Facebook board member. The firm backed RockMelt already in its first round, and participated in this one. It is another Facebook board member, Jim Breyer, who helped lead this new round on behalf of his firm, Accel Partners, and he’ll be joining RockMelt’s board. Legendary investor Vinod Khosla is also joining the board, with his Khosla Ventures also leading the round. With all this funding, and a tight partnership with the largest social network in the world, we expect to see RockMelt advertising itself more heavily on Facebook and off. Not unlike what Google has successfully been able to do by promoting Chrome across search and its other properties, as well as through traditional ads.  |
| Horoscopes, Luck, Zoosk, Mobile, Pages and More on This Week’s Top 20 Facebook Apps by DAU Posted: 29 Jun 2011 08:10 AM PDT 
Horoscopes and luck were among the top applications on our list of apps growing by daily active users this week, followed by the dating app Zoosk, quiz app Friend Buzz, a group of mobile apps, and a Turkish video app. The apps on our list below grew from between 70,700 and 1 million DAU, based on AppData, our data tracking service covering traffic growth for apps on Facebook. Top Gainers This Week | Name | DAU | Gain | Gain,% | | 1. |  Daily Horoscope | 5,868,701 | +1,042,514 | +22% | | 2. |  Your Luck [daily] | 599,423 | +562,922 | +1,542% | | 3. |  Zoosk | 1,878,945 | +427,504 | +29% | | 4. |  Empires & Allies | 6,831,823 | +358,651 | +6% | | 5. |  ibibo.com | 360,694 | +310,603 | +620% | | 6. |  Friend Buzz | 207,205 | +205,343 | +11,028% | | 7. |  Windows Live Messenger | 16,490,368 | +194,150 | +1% | | 8. |  Astrology | 2,810,372 | +188,904 | +7% | | 9. |  Yahoo! | 9,096,186 | +173,453 | +2% | | 10. |  FBML Tab Maker | 380,990 | +166,912 | +78% | | 11. |  Facebook for Every Phone | 469,723 | +160,383 | +52% | | 12. |  Gardens of Time | 3,067,611 | +141,540 | +5% | | 13. |  Static HTML: iframe tabs | 1,500,251 | +128,339 | +9% | | 14. |  flipboard | 483,384 | +89,504 | +23% | | 15. |  HTC Sense | 5,954,406 | +87,772 | +1% | | 16. |  My Tab | 244,674 | +87,659 | +56% | | 17. |  RewardVille | 1,350,388 | +86,726 | +7% | | 18. |  Global Warfare | 201,481 | +83,567 | +71% | | 19. |  Video Yeri | 75,276 | +74,812 | +16,123% | | 20. |  Slotomania – Slot Machines | 789,603 | +70,730 | +10% | Daily Horoscope is an app that grew by more than 1 million DAU this week, like a similar app Astrology with 188,900 DAU, daily Walls posts with a user's horoscope does make a big dent in a user's news feed to encourage virality. Your Luck [daily] uses a similar tactic, growing by 562,900 DAU, except that it publishes a luck percentage instead of a horoscope. 
Other apps that fell outside of a set category were Zoosk with 427,500 DAU, Friend Buzz with 205,300 DAU — this latter app is a quiz app that posts feed stories to the Walls of friends when a user answers questions about them. The Turkish video app on our list this week grew by 74,800 DAU, Video Yeri. Mobile-related apps included ibibo.com with 310,600 DAU, which allows users to select from a variety of games for otheir phones. Facebook for Every Phone from Snaptu grew by 160,400 DAU and promises to allow them to download a Facebook app for their phone. The iPad flipboard grew by 89,500 DAU and allows users to view social media information in a magazine-style layout. Finally, HTC Sense grew by 87,800 DAU. Windows Live Messenger grew by 194,200 DAU and Yahoo! by 173,500 DAU. FBML Tab Maker grew by 166,900 DAU, Static HTML: iframe tabs by 128,300 DAU and My Tab by 87,700 DAU. All data in this post comes from our traffic tracking service, AppData. Stay tuned for our look at the top emerging apps on Friday.  |
mediabistro.com
