Inside Facebook
Inside Facebook |
- Facebook Roundup: Prineville, Ceglia, Seattle, Ads, Credits, Mobile and More
- Facebook White Hat Program Now Offers Bounty for Disclosing Security Bugs
- Facebook Test Lets Users Tag Family Members by Typing How They’re Related
- Webtrends Expands From Apps and Analytics to Full Facebook Page Management Suite
- Hulu, Profile Banners, BeKnown, Friends and Twibbons on This Week’s Top 20 Emerging Facebook Apps by MAU
| Facebook Roundup: Prineville, Ceglia, Seattle, Ads, Credits, Mobile and More Posted: 29 Jul 2011 06:00 PM PDT
Facebook to Expand in Seattle – Facebook is currently looking for more office space in Seattle, according to GeekWire. The company wants as much as 40,000 square feet more that might accommodate about 200 more people (the office is currently at about 40). Privacy Glitch Makes Videos Public – TechCrunch reported that this week Facebook's video privacy settings stopped working, allowing users to see listings, names, thumbnails, descriptions and tagged users in others' videos. The company reported it had addressed the issue.
Also, a Scathing Profile of Paul Ceglia – The Buffalo News wrote a scathing and very unflattering profile of would-be Facebook co-owner Paul Ceglia. Acquaintances and classmates basically call him a con artist, shyster, joke, grifter, lowlife and more. [Image Via Facebook] User Ads Generated by Ad Companies – John Battelle wrote an interesting post this week detailing how he found out a company (AppSumo) that wasn't Facebook was using his likeness in an ad, and that this apparently violated Facebook's terms of service, promoting the social network to look into the issue. Topps Buys Facebook Gift Card Provider – AllThingsD reported this week that Topps, the trading card company, purchased GMG Entertainment, the company which makes Facebook Credits gift cards. The terms of the purchase were not released.
LivingSocial Shutters Visual Bookshelf – AllFacebook reported this week that, after four years, LivingSocial is closing its Visual Bookshelf app and encouraging users to export their accounts to GoodReads. Other Announcements:Migrate Facebook to Google+ – Lifehacker reported this week on how to migrate your Facebook profile data to Google+. North Social Releases Facebook Faux Pas – North Social released a series of 11 "fan Page fail" videos this week featuring the hapless Jonny Like who demonstrates what not to do to grow your Page's community. Trulia, Real Estate Social Search – Trulia.com is a social recommendation service using Facebook to leverage word-of-mouth when it comes to buying and selling real estate. Shoutlet Releases 4.0 – Shoutlet released the 4.0 version of its platform this week, and includes better analytics and the ability to take these and transform them into graphics. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Facebook White Hat Program Now Offers Bounty for Disclosing Security Bugs Posted: 29 Jul 2011 12:54 PM PDT Facebook has added a bounty system to its white hat program today that rewards security researchers for privately and responsibly informing the company of site vulnerabilities. Researchers can make $500 or more for disclosing bugs that could endanger users, such as cross-site scripting (XSS), or remote code injection. Facebook had previously allowed researchers to submit bugs, but the addition of a monetary reward announced today on the Facebook Security Page should encourage participation in the program and help the site close gaps in security before they’re exploited.
The white hat program was first launched in December 2010, protecting researchers that happened to break its terms of service in the process of responsibly discovering and reporting vulnerabilities. Previously, their accounts were in jeopardy if they submitted research that require TOS violations, discouraging participation in the program. Researchers must still “make a good faith effort to avoid privacy violations, destruction of data and interruption or degradation of our service”, and “give us a reasonable time to respond to your report before making any information public.” Data mining or scraping, and using fake accounts to perform security research leading to a disclosure is likely admissible. Eligible bugs include those found on Facebook.com, Facebook mobile apps, and the Platform APIs. To claim the bounty, researchers must be the first to responsibly report a bug, reside in a country not under US sanction, and only one bounty will be awarded per bug. Reports of bugs in third-party apps or websites, Facebook’s corporate infrastructure, as well as spam, social engineering, and denial of service issues are not eligible for a bounty.
The site has made wide variety of other efforts to both technically improve security and educate users about how to protect themselves. It began allowing users to browse over a secure HTTPS connection in January, will require third-party apps to support HTTPS by October, and now shows security roadblocks when users click links suspected of XSS or clickjacking. Facebook has partnered with Web of Trust to identify suspicious links, and McAfee to offer users discounted virus protection. Facebook has been criticized in the past when security researchers publicly announced vulnerabilities rather than privately disclosing them. The new bounty system might convince them to use the white hat program instead, allowing Facebook to improve security without taking a public relations hit. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Facebook Test Lets Users Tag Family Members by Typing How They’re Related Posted: 29 Jul 2011 10:00 AM PDT Facebook users can now tag a family member in a post by typing in how they are related, rather than their name. For example, typing in “Cousin” will open the typeahead and display any friend the user has confirmed as their cousin through the Family & Friends tab in the profile editor. The new way to initiate a tag should lead to more tagging of family members, and be especially useful to those looking to quickly call attention of family members to a particular post, such as an announcement that they’re coming to visit. Facebook is testing the new tagging functionality with some portion of the user base, though it could be fully rolled out in the future.
Facebook has let users to tag friends in posts since September 2009. Recently, it has made several changes to tagging, allowing users to tag connections such as friends within comments, and shorten the displayed tags of friends to just their first or last name, It also removed the ability for Pages to tag users in posts, likely to prevent spam. Tagging friends is a useful way to draw attention to a post. It delivers a notification to anyone tagged, basically assuring that they’ll see it. It also increases the news feed visibility, or EdgeRank, of the post to the friends of those tagged. Typically, only 15% of a user’s friend base sees each of their posts according to a comScore white paper, but tagging several friends in a post can generate more impressions for it. Users can pull up the tagging typeahead by typing with a capital letter either the official family relation type, such as “Sister”, “Uncle” or “Father; or the slang term for the relation type such as “Dad” or “Mom”.
When users select the family member from the typeahead, it replaces the official or slang relation name. This can sometime require users to go back and edit their text, as the word “my” frequently precedes family relation names (“my cousin”), but is not grammatically correct when used before a name. The addition of the tagging feature may seem insignificant, but it is representative of Facebook’s product update culture. By making many small changes to the interface over time, Facebook can test to see what features gain traction, implement those that work, and scrap those that don’t. It occasionally launches big new products and redesigns, but more subtle updates like this are a big reason why Facebook has stayed relevant, intuitive to use, and growing for seven years. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Webtrends Expands From Apps and Analytics to Full Facebook Page Management Suite Posted: 29 Jul 2011 08:35 AM PDT
The launch of free, middle-market, and enterprise tiers of Webtrends Social will put the company in competition with a variety of players in the Page management industry.
Webtrends Social combines a great deal of functionality, allowing clients to post to, moderate, and track performance of their Facebook Page; install pre-made apps or build their own, and track the conversion on custom events of ads leading to their Pages and apps. Webtrends will continue to offer its previously available Facebook ads managed spend, DIY app platform, and custom app development services. The only thing really missing from the product is the ability to buy and target Facebook ad campaigns, which clients still have to do through Facebook.com or another Facebook Ads API tool or service. If Webtrends were to build or acquire an ad buying product, it could become perhaps the most comprehensive licensable Facebook marketing tool available. Clients can get most of the functionality for free, though they can only use it on one Page, and they can only build one app. For $250 a month per Page with less than 100,000 fans they can build 5 apps buys the ability per Page. The enterprise tier offers unlimited app building for Pages of any size, plus collaboration capabilities and enhanced campaign analytics at the price of $3000 a month per Page. This pricing model’s free tier lets potential enterprise clients get an accurate sense of the power of the product. For many smaller companies the free tier could be all they need — allowing Webtrends to edge out less robust free and even low cost tool. A mid-level pricing tier for Pages of any size could make the product better suited for the middle market. Also, the enterprise tier’s per Page model would become to expensive for companies with a corporate / local structure that have dozens or even hundreds of Pages to manage. Wide Feature SetThe Pages dashboard lets clients view Page growth analytics, see where Page views are sourced from, and track the fan counts of competitors. The Page walls moderation feature lets admins assign posts to teammates, filter the stream to find objectionable posts, and set up keyword blacklists or use a pre-defined list of “bad words”. The Post tab lets clients compose and schedule news feed posts. Webtrends Social’s app suite includes a wide variety of app templates that can be customized and installed on Pages. Some of the content apps clients can choose from include Twitter, YouTube, landing tabs, coupons flash and HTML, while engagement apps include a quiz, sweepstakes, polls, surveys, and photo manipulation. The product provides analytics on performance and user demographics of the apps so admins can determine what app types and designs best engage fans.
Advertisers can give Webtrends Social permission to access their Facebook ads account. They then import an existing Facebook ad campaign, assign it to the Page app it leads to, and select a conversion metric such as Facebook, Twitter, or email shares. Clients can then view a funnel to determine the post-click success of their ad campaign
Webtrends Social provides much more functionality than most free tools offer. Peter Yared, VP of social technology platforms for Webtrends, says the product will be a “signficant threat to those offering a free or low end tier” Page management solution. We agree, as most other free Page management solutions aren’t nearly as full-featured or polished, and clients could use another low cost app developer to round out their app selection. The lower tiers should encourage potential enterprise clients to try out the product. Large businesses interested in executing their Facebook strategy themselves will now have another option in addition to Buddy Media, Vitrue, Context Optional, Involver, Syncapse, Wildfire, and other social media management platforms. A trend of consolidation in the Facebook marketing industry has been gaining steam, with a few of these companies having been partnered or been acquired by Ads API partners such that their clients can buy ads through their platforms. While Webtrends Social can track ad conversion, it can’t be used to buy ads. Yared says the industry is “definitely going to see consolidation and roll up especially amongst players that are campaign based. Within a year, we expect to see about three to five players in the space.” Having already acquired Transpond, Webtrends might try to solidify its position by buying an ad buying tool and offering a truly integrated solution. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Posted: 29 Jul 2011 08:29 AM PDT
The apps on our list grew from between 104,600 and 350,900 MAU, based on AppData, our data tracking service covering traffic growth for apps on Facebook. All in all, it was a pretty typical week for the emerging category, which we define as apps that ended with between 100,000 and 1 million MAU in the past week. Top Gainers This Week
Three profile banner apps — the ones that allow users to select from among different photos and then create an image across the top of their profile — made the list this week, two were in Spanish. Banner de perfil en espagnol grew by 350,900 MAU and Banner de perfil en espagnol by 284,300 MAU. Then Profile Banner by 104,600 MAU. Generally these apps publish feed stories alerting friends to the use of the app.
BeKnown's app grew by 235,400 MAU this week; the app comes from Monster.com, allows users to update their profiles from other recruiting sites, as well as earn badges and what-not within the app. Hulu's Connect app has been growing steadily over the past few weeks and this week with 165,800 MAU. A pair of friend apps were on the list. Together allows users to make "matches" from among friends, publishing the result to the friend's Wall; the app grew by 136,200 MAU this week. Top Friends of mine(ENHANCED) publishes a photo, tagging a user's friends, of the most interacted with people; the app grew by 107,100 MAU.
Finally, Twibbon, grew by 105,300 MAU in the United States and Philippines. The Connect app allows users to publish a photo of themselves with a "ribbon" over their profile photo for a particular cause. The app's virality is probably due in no small part of the large number of feed stories created by its use: the app publishes one upon use, then publishes a user's photo, then asks the user to promote the app on Facebook or Twitter. All data in this post comes from our traffic tracking service, AppData. Stay tuned next week for our look at the top weekly gainers by monthly active users on Monday, the top weekly gainers by daily active users on Wednesday, and the top emerging apps on Friday. |
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