Inside Facebook
Inside Facebook |
- Relevvant and Constant Contact Bring TextualAds SMS Signup and Publishing App to Facebook Pages
- CrowdMob’s Mafia Location Game Harnesses Facebook Places to Drive Downloads
- Musicians Test Charging Facebook Credits for Pay-Per-View Concert Streams
- New This Week on the Inside Network Job Board: Acquinity Interactive, A Bit Lucky, King.com, Tagged and More
- European Privacy Authorities to Investigate Facebook’s Opt Out Facial Recognition
- Badoo, Zoosk, Phrases, Horoscopes and Luck on This Week’s Top 20 Facebook Apps by DAU
| Relevvant and Constant Contact Bring TextualAds SMS Signup and Publishing App to Facebook Pages Posted: 08 Jun 2011 06:08 PM PDT
The partnership should help Constant Contact keep its service offering relevant as more marketing occurs on Facebook. Constant Contact has already made several acquisitions in the last year to further this same goal. In February it bought social CRM startup Bantam Live, which offered a dashboard for managing messaging and workflow activity surrounding contacts on Facebook and Twitter in real time. In May 2010 it acquired NutshellMail, whose system for aggregating social media updates into emailed digests it used to offer a social media tracking system for clients. Now, Constant Contact customers will have access to TextualAds. Facebook Page admins enter the app which provides a WYIWYG editor for designing an SMS alerts signup tab application to be hosted on their Page. Phone numbers collected from the tab can sent text messages informing the fans about discounts, contests, events, or other news. TextualAds permits admins to target specific subsets of their audience based on location and profile characteristics.
Admins can view dashboards of metrics on subscribers and SMS campaigns, and can receive a special keyword and shortcode that allows fans to signup for SMS updates via text message. They can also receive the code for a TextualAds widget for display elsewhere on the web. The partnership will permit easy importing and exporting of user contact information between TextualAds and Constant Contact. Email marketing companies are becoming a consolidating force in the Facebook ecosystem as they spend the cash they earned during the boom years prior to the emergence of social networks to buy Facebook-related services relevant to their core businesses. In January, Experian purchased Facebook Ads API developer Techlightenment in January, and FanBridge acquired musician and brand promotion app developer DamnTheRadio. Small developers building utility apps for marketing and communication, social advertising technologies, and page management are in a strong position to take advantage of the service gaps of well-established but slower moving companies from the pre-social era. They can either provide necessary complements to clients of these old service suites, become acquisition targets like the companies listed above, or strike lucrative partnerships that open doors to huge volumes of clients as Relevvant has done here. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| CrowdMob’s Mafia Location Game Harnesses Facebook Places to Drive Downloads Posted: 08 Jun 2011 04:43 PM PDT
But a veteran team from the social gaming world is trying to disprove this with its first app Mob Empire, a Foursquare-meets-Mafia Wars game. CrowdMob, which was co-founded by LOLapps’ former creative director Damon Grow, Alex Han and Matt Moore, is among a handful of startups that are trying to build location-enabled mobile games that are genuinely social. The app, which the company has intentionally kept quiet about since its April 1 launch, pits friends and strangers against each other in a quest to gain control of venues in their city. The game has a modest number of users at the moment with just over 17,000 Facebook monthly actives on AppData, but that’s because the company hasn’t really publicized it to date. Grow said the company is focused on getting engagement of existing users up and ensuring the back-end can scale before marketing or promoting the title. > Continue reading on Inside Mobile Apps. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Musicians Test Charging Facebook Credits for Pay-Per-View Concert Streams Posted: 08 Jun 2011 02:55 PM PDT Musicians have begun allowing fans to exchange Facebook Credits for access to pay-per-view streams of concerts, and the standard price seems to be 50 Credits per show, the equivalent of $5. American jam band Widespread Panic has launched a Facebook app in partnership with ecommerce platform Milyoni’s Social Theater to process Credits payments, while English singer/songwriter David Gray is working with European telecom O2 to accept Facebook Credits, PayPal, and credit card payments. Initially designed for payment of virtual goods in social games, Facebook Credits have recently been used as a payment system for some digital media including film rentals. Now the music business is experimenting to see whether Facebook’s virtual currency, built-in audience, and communication features can help it grow pay-per-view concerts as a revenue stream.
Despite the lack of a native Facebook music playing app, musicians and Facebook have started to depend on each in several ways over the past few years. With the decline of Myspace, hundreds of thousands of musicians now stream their music from third-party applications such as RootMusic’s BandPage and ReverbNation’s BandProfile, which they host as tab apps on their Facebook Pages. The Pages act as a portal to purchasing concert tickets, merchandise, and MP3s, as well as a place to launch new singles. Facebook benefits from musicians as well, as nearly half of the most popular Facebook Pages are music related. Fans spend time on the site to consume music news, stream music, discuss their favorite artists, and post photos and check-ins from concerts they attend. Facebook recently revived its official “Music on Facebook” Page, which it uses to share useful tips for musicians, venues, industry professionals, and listeners. Links about concerts posted on Facebook drive up to $5.30 in ticket sales each, and social shares have been shown to generate significant amounts of MP3 sales. However most of these sales occur off-site, such as on iTunes, where Facebook doesn’t get a cut, and the connection between social media efforts and profits is less clear. The new experiments with charging users Facebook Credits to watch concerts through Facebook apps could change this, earning money for the social network through its 30% tax on Credits and demonstrating Facebook’s importance to the industry. Pages of both Widespread Panic and David Gray feature tab applications through which users can pay 50 Facebook Credits for access to live and rebroadcasted streams of a concert. The artists promote the applications in posts to their Facebook fans and to their websites.
The purchasing experience for David Gray’s concert is simple, and once Credits are transferred, the app reloads to display the streaming player. The option to pay with credit card or PayPal and watch on David Gray’s website expands the accessibility of the pay-per-view experience, but also permits fans to watch in an environment with less viral potential. While the Widespread Panic shows to be streamed don’t occur until next week, the purchase process is somewhat clumsy, as it’s difficult to tell if one has successfully paid, which could lead users to accidentally make redundant purchases. Those who pay can watch David Gray’s concert which is occurring right now in Dublin, or view rebroadcasts later this evening and tomorrow. The audio quality is pretty good, as is the video minus the occasional short lag or choppiness.
His streaming app wisely allows users to post comments to a discussion feed while watching, with the comments defaulting to being posted to a commenter’s friends via the news feed. This drives more traffic back to the app, stimulating sales. The app also displays a Like Box social plugin encouraging users to Like the O2 Blue Room music division’s Page. These social features resolve our primary complaint with the Warner Bros film studios’ experiment with streaming films such as The Dark Knight for Facebook Credits — namely that it wasn’t inherently social, with no way to discuss the film with other viewers nor invite friends without interrupting the viewing experience. Musicians that are already filming their concerts, and especially those offering pay-per-view off of Facebook, should consider syndicating their shows through a Facebook app in exchange for Credits. The site’s viral channels can draw in new customers, its Pages offer strong fan retention and communication opportunities, and Facebook Credits makes it easy to accept payments. Success of these early experiments could help Facebook Credits pay-per-view concerts emerge as way for musicians as well as their record labels and management to generate a direct return on investment on building and engaging a Facebook fan base. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Posted: 08 Jun 2011 12:22 PM PDT 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 Acquinity Interactive, A Bit Lucky, King.com, Kixeye, Tagged and lolapps.
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. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| European Privacy Authorities to Investigate Facebook’s Opt Out Facial Recognition Posted: 08 Jun 2011 10:47 AM PDT The European Union has taken issue with the worldwide rollout of Facebook’s opt out facial recognition feature that suggests friends to tag in photos upon upload, as we predicted yesterday. Bloomberg Businessweek reports that Facebook will be the subject of a probe by the Article 29 Data Protection Working Party, a committee that advises the 27 EU nations on matters “affecting the rights and freedoms of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and privacy”. We were surprised to see Facebook quietly expand the audience of the opt out feature from its initial North American user base to the rest of the world, including to Europe, which has filed wide-ranging complaints about Facebook’s privacy policies in the past. Now, Facebook may be forced to reset the feature in Europe to default to opt in, which could hamper the site’s ability to coax more photo tags out of users.
The feature “Suggest photos of me to friends” was launched in North America in December 2010. Here’s our explanation of how it works, from our post yesterday:
Some users may not want their faces analyzed and identified in Facebook photos, the world’s largest collection of photographs. Facebook’s only public announcement of the wider rollout came after criticism began yesterday. It added a short update to a blog post from December about the feature and published a link the post to Facebook’s official Page when a new blog post may have been warranted. The initial silence about the expansion of the feature made it seem as if Facebook was trying to hide that it had added a new opt out privacy setting to the accounts of hundreds of millions of users. Potential Changes to Facial Recognition Feature
Facebook typically adds functionality to the site in an opt out manner because few users would take the time or have the confidence to manually enable new features. However, we recommend it pair these opt out additions with timely, prominent announcements and awareness campaigns, which it failed to do here. This may be a case where the site will have to take two steps backward, changing “Suggest photos of me to friends” to opt in, because it didn’t take a transparent step forward by more visibly notifying users outside North America of the privacy setting. Photo tags have never required consent, other than being friends with the person doing the tagging, so that’s not likely to change. There’s a lot of potential value in facial recognition streamlining the tedious photo tagging process for users, and Lommel’s statement doesn’t appear to recognize this. This will be reduced, though, if only a portion of the users sees the photo tag suggestions because Facebook surprised much of the world with the roll out and conservative authorities react strongly. The company’s best bet at this point may be to add a prompt, tooltip, or announcement within the site alerting users to the change. This could allow it to claim users were made aware that facial recognition had been added and enabled, perhaps swaying authorities that might otherwise demand the feature be removed or defaulted to disabled. Facebook has historically complied with government injunctions regarding privacy and censorship. If EU and Irish authorities return with demands that the feature be changed, Facebook would likely comply, and it could embolden other government around the world to request similar alterations. This could mean that many users will continue to tag photos by hand because their government has disabled the elegant technological solution designed to assist them. Update 6/8/2011 3:15pm PST: Facebook spokeswoman Sophy Tobias has been quoted by Reuters saying ”We have noted the comments from some regulators about this [facial recognition] feature and we are providing them with additional information which we are confident will satisfy any concerns they will have,” Though Facebook has stated that it should have been”more clear with people during the roll-out process when this became available to them”, it has yet to announce any change to the feature or its privacy settings. The last time Facebook encountered stern privacy criticism was over it allowing applications to request the phone number and home address of users. In response to the backlash, Facebook quickly disabled the capability. It later had to respond to inquiries from two members of Congress, and the option is still disabled. In contrast, Facebook appears to be holding its ground on the facial recognition issue, and may wait for formal requests from authorities before changing the feature. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Badoo, Zoosk, Phrases, Horoscopes and Luck on This Week’s Top 20 Facebook Apps by DAU Posted: 08 Jun 2011 09:00 AM PDT
The apps on our list grew from between 134,000 and 1.1 million DAU. We compile the list 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
Friend Buzz, which as we mentioned is a quiz app, grew by 1.1 million; the app's virality is due to feed stories being published to the Walls of friends when a user answers questions about them in the app. Phrases Other apps on the list this week included Yahoo, with about 218,000 DAU. Phrases, which is not available in the United States, grew by 208,500; the app did grow in the Philippines, France and Italy. 60 Photos is an app that grew by 193,000 DAU and lets users rate their friends' Facebook photos, publishing feed stories with positive ratings. Video House is a Turkish video app that lets users view and share videos that grew by 143,800 DAU. There was the Windows Live Messenger app with 138,100 DAU and the Flipboard app with 134,000 DAU, which allows iPad users to see their social media content in a magazine-style layout.
Then there were horoscopes and luck apps. Daily Horoscope grew by more than 1 million DAU in Turkey; the app can post daily to a users' Wall. Then Astrology grew by 199,100 DAU in the US, also because it posts daily to a user's Wall. Luck Daily! grew by 728,600 DAU and Your Luck [daily] by 480,600 DAU and both apps publish a percentage of luck to your stream daily.
The dating apps on the list are the most popular Facebook apps for this purpose, and we haven't seen all four of them on the list very often. Are YOU Interested? is an app that grew by 291,000 DAU in the US, United Kingdom and India. Badoo grew by 225,300 DAU in Mexico, France and Italy and Cupid grew by 155,800 DAU in the US and India. These three apps all share a common viral feature: they utilize a photo rating functionality. Users essentially rate a photo as interested, answer a question of those in the photo or rate one of several photos in a group. Then Zoosk grew by 154,400 DAU mostly in the US. All data in this post comes from our traffic tracking service, AppData. Stay tuned for our look at the top emerging apps on Friday. |
Relevvant
Even though Facebook likely has around 700 million users now, it actually isn’t often that we hear the social network is a major driver for user acquisition in mobile gaming — at least compared to FreeAppADay or having an inside connection to Apple.
Gerard Lommel, a member of the Article 29 watchdog committee said that “Tags of people on pictures should only happen based on people's prior consent and it can't be activated by default”, and adds that the Working Party will “clarify to Facebook that this can't happen like this.” Ireland’s data protection authority will also examine the feature.
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