Inside Facebook
Inside Facebook |
- Katango Could Solve Facebook Friend List Creation Problems, But For Now It’s Just Group Messaging
- Hulu Relaunches Facebook Integration. Can a Free Month of Hulu Plus Offset Privacy Issues?
- Facebook Launching Corporate-Local Parent-Child Places Structure for Businesses With Multiple Locations
- Featured Facebook Campaigns: New Jersey Lottery, Tretorn, Toys “R” Us & Craftsman Tools
- 60 Photos, Page Tabs, Videos, Mobile, Zoosk and More on This Week’s Top 20 Facebook Apps by MAU
| Katango Could Solve Facebook Friend List Creation Problems, But For Now It’s Just Group Messaging Posted: 11 Jul 2011 09:01 PM PDT Katango is a simple mobile group messaging app built on technology with huge potential. The first Kleiner Perkins sFund investment, Katango debut is an eponymous iPhone app that lets users send email, private Facebook wall posts and in-app messages to lists of friend that it automatically that it automatically assembles. It’s this last part that’s so important. Based on data about a user’s interconnectedness with their friends, Katango instantly and accurately builds what Facebook calls friend lists and Google+ calls Circles. When the company showed me a prototype web interface in early June, it allowed users to export these groups as Facebook friend lists. Without the ability to send SMS to message recipients that haven’t download the app, it will be hard to compete in mobile messaging with GroupMe and Beluga. However, the algorithm that automatically create friend lists could be be a deciding factor in the battle between Facebook, Google and others for social network supremacy.
Kleiner Perkins invested $5 million of its $250 million social fund into Katango when it was still called Cafebots. The team includes two Stanford PhD graudates who studied artificial intelligence, a Stanford computer science professor, and Yee Lee, who worked on product for PayPal and Slide. After more than six months of work, the team produced the friend sorting algorithm, and is now releasing its first product. When users first open the app, they’re required to login with Facebook. The app then takes a little time crunching their friendship data before revealing their freshly minted friend groups that cluster together sets of friends such as closest friends, graduating high school class, family, and coworkers. I was amazed by how accurate it was. It picked out 18 of my different friend groups including a set from my time studying a different college, and the people met on a recent trip abroad. The groups rarely had more than a few omissions or wrongful admissions.
Each group displays a facepile of its members, and is titled with the first names of members. Unfortunately the app doesn’t show groups of people you frequently interact with at the top, or move those you actually message to the top either. Users can go into a group and name it whatever they want and refine it by adding additional friends from Facebook or their phone’s contacts and removing any that were mistakenly included. They can then send messages and photos which friends will receive via email, in-app message, or Facebook wall post that is only visible to those in the conversation. The app would only really be useful if you spent a lot of time wall posting and emailing content to multiple friends from your mobile device, which few do. Luckily, the company tells me it is planning to build a platform for integrating its technology into third-party products. The question is whether that includes Facebook and Google. If users of those networks could use Katango’s algorithm to build then export their friend groups, they wouldn’t necessarily need to come back. Katango holds the key to Google+’s big problem of getting its users to categorize their friends into Circle before being able to share with them. With its new competitor focusing on selective sharing, friend lists are becoming a much bigger issue for Facebook as well. Right now only 5% of users create friend lists, and the rest of Facebook 712 million users could certainly benefit from having them. If Facebook could create friend lists accurately and automatically, it could get users to share more frequently, and control their privacy settings more easily. Facebook should be looking to release an improvement to friend lists before Google+ shows its potential. If it had technology like Katango’s now, it might be able to stop Google+ in its tracks. Build, partner, or acquire — Facebook will need to do one because while Katango is just a mobile group messaging app today, automated friend list creation is vital to the social network’s future. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Hulu Relaunches Facebook Integration. Can a Free Month of Hulu Plus Offset Privacy Issues? Posted: 11 Jul 2011 03:58 PM PDT
Hulu is betting the social content will lead to more usage, so it’s giving users a free month of Hulu Plus, normally $7.99, for signing in with Facebook. However, it will need to make privacy settings more accessible to provide both a better user experience, avoid spamming Facebook, and protect itself from backlash.
The initial Facebook integration that Hulu pushed on July 1st had to be disabled because an error caused users trying to merge their new Facebook Hulu account with their pre-existing Hulu account to become logged into the accounts of other users. Hulu claimed responsibility for the issue, absolving Facebook, and said that no sensitive user data was leaked. Still it error may have made some users weary of signing in with Facebook, making the incentive it also offered alongside the initial integration even more important. Social Features, Privacy IssuesNow, Hulu has relaunched the Facebook integration. When users visit the home page, they’ll see a roadblock popup about “Hulu. Now With Friends.” Those who choose to login with Facebook Connect are emailed info about redeeming their one month of Hulu Plus. If users don’t already have a Hulu account, they can quickly set up the remaining details not available through Connect and select their privacy setting for who can see what they’ve watched. However, if users have a pre-existing account and merge it with their new account, they’re not prompted to reset their privacy setting. This could raise privacy concerns because selecting to share what one watches with friends meant something very different when that only included your specific Hulu friends, of which users probably had few, compared to now when that info could be exposed to hundreds of Facebook friends.
Once set up, users will see content from Facebook friends on their home page’s friend activity feed. This shows what friends are watching and commenting on, and allows them to add their own replies to these activity stories. Hulu could have gone a step further and converted a user’s Facebook Likes into favorites, which would feed more data into its recommendation engine and relieve users from having the select favorites manually. While watching shows, users can see which of their friends have watched that show too. Similar to Soundcloud, users can leave timed comments about specific moments of a show, so a user’s friends can tell what they were referencing.
By default, all comments and a video clip of the scene they’re left on, as well as ratings, reviews, favorites, and forum posts are published to Facebook. Users can’t opt out of syndicating to Facebook on a post-by-post basis, and instead must opt out through their Hulu privacy settings. This opt out system may lead to more posts to Facebook and therefore more referral traffic it also creates an aggravating user experience where one can’t easily switch between publishing to Facebook or just to Hulu while watching. If someone wants to post multiple comments about a single scene and Facebook publishing is enabled, they’ll have to redundantly publish multiples video of the same scene to Facebook, which their friends might see as overkill.
Facebook believes TV watching is an inherently social experience that can be made better with friends, since it extended its Instant Personalization to online TV listings guide Clicker in December. Hulu’s Facebook integration provides a lot of value to users, even more so because of the Hulu Plus incentive. Still, TV watching can at times be a private experience, so more transparency and flexibility in its privacy settings might reassure users that they are in control and won’t spam friends. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Posted: 11 Jul 2011 01:00 PM PDT Documents detailing an upcoming change to Facebook Pages and Places have been found by our German sister site, AllFacebook.de . They indicate that Facebook will be implementing a new parent-child management structure for Places that will allow corporations to administrate all the Places pages of the local instances of their business. On corporate parent Pages, an in-house “Locations” app will automatically display nearby branches and allow users to search for local branches by zip code, and child Places will feature a link back to their corporate Page. Giants from foodservice, retail, insurance and other industries are already setting up Places for each of their branches to facilitiate local marketing and encourage checkins using the clumsier old system. Facebook’s new parent-child structure will make this process simpler and more systematized, which could lead more corporations to buy Facebook ads for their local branches.
The way Facebook’s location-based service originally worked made it difficult for corporations that needed to set up multiple Places, whether in the dozens or the thousands. Places, separate from Pages, had to be set up or claimed and then clumsily merged with Pages. Facebook has since streamlined this process, giving checkin functionality to any Page that lists a street address. A corporation’s Page and all its local branch Pages still couldn’t be connected on the backend of Facebook’s admin system, though. This meant that if a corporation wanted to push a branding or slogan change to all its Pages, or manage regulatory compliance, a single corporate representative had to be individually granted admin privileges to every Page. Even then, changes had to be pushed one Page at a time. Third-party Page management products such as Hearsay Social launched to specifically handle the corporate-local problem. This seemed like a lucrative business as corporations such as State Farm and 24 Hour Fitness were spending a lot on Facebook marketing, and the solution seemed more complicated than something Facebook would design a native product for. However, close relationships that Facebook has forged with corporations through its inside ad sales teams have now led it to address the corporate-local Page management issue. Parent-Child Admin System and Pages API ChangesFacebook will offer a parent-child Page set up tool. Once the connections between parent and child Pages are arranged, parent Pages will include a Locations tab in their Edit Page admin interface navigation menu. The Locations admin interface will display a list of all child Pages, including the store ID, address, Like count, and checkin count of each. This will make it simple for a corporation to monitor the performance of its child Pages. Admins will be able to search for a specific child Page by store ID, and make the Locations Page tab application visible to users or hide it.
When using Facebook as the parent Page, admins will have full admin control over the child Pages, meaning they can go in and edit a Page’s info, post or moderate content, change settings, and install tab applications. This means corporations will be able to swiftly address threats to their branding by deleting the posts of local branch admins or fans, as well as coordinate marketing campaigns such as the installation of a new sweepstakes app. Child page admins won’t be able to remove admin privileges from parent admins. It appears that Facebook will also support the parent-child Page structure in the Pages API. Settings, apps, and content moderation will be able to be controlled programmatically, enabling corporations to push changes to many Pages at once. For example, McDonalds could use the parent-child Page API to install an application and publish an update promoting it on all of its local Pages simultaneously. Corporations will also be able to use a Checkin Deals API to offer rewards to users for visiting any of their local branches in person. The corporate-local Pages API could encourage more developers to build apps designed for tighter integration between different levels of a company. For instance, developers could build contest apps that include local run-offs on child Pages leading to worldwide finals that are held on a parent Page. With time, Facebook may build more corporate-local moderation and publishing features into the graphic user interface so corporations can easily change the wall settings, ban certain words, or post content across all their Pages without the use of any code. This could commodify some third-party Page management services, forcing companies offering these services to look for other ways to provide value to their clients. Locations In-House Page Tab ApplicationFacebook users visiting a parent Page will see a Locations tab app in the Page’s navigation menu. Parent pages will display a store locator, allowing users to search for nearby branches by zip code. A map and list will automatically show users nearby branches of a business, and allow them to visit the corresponding child Pages. These features will help users discover the local branches of their favorite corporations. This will in turn help drive foot traffic, and engagement with location-based Checkin Deals.
Child Pages will display a link to their parent Page just below their name, allowing corporations to gain Likes from supporters of their local branches. Checkin counts from child Pages will be summed on the Parent page to give a more accurate impression of the global popularity of the business.
Overall, the parent-child structure and Locations app seem like a strong start to accommodating businesses and organizations with a corporate-local structure. These include some of the world’s biggest brands who are also the world’s biggest spending advertisers. If Facebook can get more corporations with local branches onto the Platform and using the parent-child Page system, it could lead to the launch of a huge number of new, well-funded local Pages that it could offer its advertising services to. We’re currently awaiting confirmation from Facebook on a release date and specifics about how Pages can access the parent-child set up tool and what’s new in the Pages API. Check back over next few days for more information. Strategies for using Facebook Places to market your business can found in the Facebook Marketing Bible, Inside Network’s complete guide to marketing and advertising through Facebook. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Featured Facebook Campaigns: New Jersey Lottery, Tretorn, Toys “R” Us & Craftsman Tools Posted: 11 Jul 2011 11:14 AM PDT Brands on our post this week used livestreaming, social commerce and photo contests to attract users and customers during the slow summer months. We've excerpted two of the campaigns below. You can see the full week's coverage in the Facebook Marketing Bible, which also includes detailed breakdowns of dozens of other featured campaigns by top-performing brands and businesses on Facebook. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 60 Photos, Page Tabs, Videos, Mobile, Zoosk and More on This Week’s Top 20 Facebook Apps by MAU Posted: 11 Jul 2011 08:06 AM PDT
Top Gainers This Week
60photos topped our list by far with 3.6 million new MAU; the app asks users to rate friends’ Facebook photos either "nice" or "pass" and generates a Wall post when you rate the photo "nice." Since there are so many photos on Facebook, and users generally enjoy this part of the service, the result seems to be good news for this app. It’s not clear if Facebook itself might consider the app to be too spammy, though.
Static HTML: iframe tabs grew by 3.1 million MAU this week, Static Iframe Tab by 702,200 MAU and Welcome tab app for Pages by 520,300 MAU mostly in the Philippines. These Page tab apps were very popular this week and help users create customized Page tabs for their Pages. Video apps also made our list. VEVO for Artists grew by 1.6 million MAU; this app brings together an artist's VEVO videos on a tab for their Page. Turkish video apps also made the list. Video Yeri grew by 879,200 MAU and Video Galerisi by 594,600 MAU. Basically these two allow users to view, share and Like videos.
Everything else was varied. Facebook for Every Phone is Snaptu's Facebook mobile app, and grew by 1.3 million MAU. Zoosk the dating app grew by 948,500 MAU mostly in the U.S. Daily Horoscope, which allows users to receive daily horoscope Wall posts, grew by 795,300 MAU. Yahoo!'s app grew by 670,200 MAU. Finally, Socialbox grew by 563,000 MAU and is a downloadable desktop chat app. All data in this post comes from our traffic tracking service, AppData. Stay tuned for our look at the top weekly gainers by daily active users on Wednesday, and the top emerging apps on Friday. |
After a botched first attempt at social that caused some users to become logged into the wrong accounts, Hulu has 
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